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<h2 align="center">Philosophy and Culture</h2>
<h3 align="center">"The Melancholic Gift: Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Fiction"</h3>
<h4 align="center">Thomas Pfau, Duke University</h4>
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<p>This paper presents some thoughts on the antagonism between nineteenth-century European liberalism (taken here in its broadest sense as a self-regulating narrative of economic and civic progress) and the simultaneously spreading idioms of cultural pessimism, anti-rationalism, and decadence. Behind these two ideological strata stands a more fundamental tension between a modern conception of political liberty with its supplemental language of rights, on the one hand, and an alternately mystical or mournful reflection on modern freedom and the metaphysical costs of modernity, on the other. Representative voices of the latter would include Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Schopenhauer, Burckhardt, Wagner, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Spengler (to name but the most conspicuous). My central contention with regard to these writers' pessimistic conceptions of freedom and their overall anti-modern pathos is that we ought to read them less as a <em>separate</em> current opposing the dominant narrative of nineteenth-century liberalism and its identification with rights, institutions, and the competitive individualism they foster than as a Blakean contrary surfacing within and disrupting the master narrative of nineteenth-century liberalism. What accounts for the aesthetic force and pervasive appeal of Romantic conservatism, cultural pessimism and/or neo-Stoicism within the industrial, nationalist, and imperialist phase of European modernity is something that liberalism's rights-based theory of social and economic organization was unable to accommodate&mdash;namely, the metaphysical dilemma of freedom.</p>
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<p>At the heart of nineteenth-century liberalism, the political and economic self-description and self-legitimation of which is furnished in various inflections by Locke, Smith, Paine, Thelwall, Bentham, and Mill, we find two central notions&mdash;that of individual self-generation (<em>epigenesis</em>) and that of historical caesura (<em>epoche</em>), according to which, as Thomas Paine puts it, "every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require, . . . [for] the living, and not the dead, are to be accommodated" (Paine 42). It is in the languages of "bourgeois radicalism" (as Isaac Kramnick has called it) that political legitimation and economic expediency converge most fully, a phenomenon articulated forecefully in Marx's and Engels's paean to the revolutionary force and infinite resourcefulness of capital with its "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" (Marx and Engels 224). In transposing the self-originating and iconoclastic force of the Cartesian <em>cogito</em> into the domain of political and economic life and so melting "all that is solid into thin air," the classical liberalism of Hume, Smith and, even more so, the Whig radicals of the 1790s, construed liberty as the <em>absence</em> of external constraints on individuals' pursuit of their contingent motives. Accounting for the status of these motives within a broader social framework or general theory of the <em>polis</em> was no longer a recognized obligation for either <em>homo economicus</em> or <em>homo politicus</em>. Hence Hume's and Smith's influential construction of sympathy as a kind of virtual social compound supplants, as John Milbank puts it, "the irreducible primacy of an inherently ethical end or <em>telos</em> and . . . ground[s] the moral in something specifically pre-moral, natural and sub-rational," just as the virtues of justice are now anchored in "force of habit" in the "regular exercise of property and contractual laws, so that we perceive that we have an 'interest' in justice" (Milbank 29).</p>
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<p>Pared down to the mere lubricant for a means-end rationality whose most dogmatic form would be that of utilitarianism (as in Bentham, Ricardo, and Mill), "liberty" thus is defined as the sum total of so many disaggregated "rights." Just as the accent in James Steuart is on "wage-labor as a mode of <em>discipline,</em> not as a mode of freedom" (Milbank 35), the rights of life, property, and contract serve one purpose only, namely, to facilitate the pursuit of so many discrete and non-negotiable "motives." It is therefore quite inconceivable, as Bentham bluntly states, that "the word <em>right</em> can have a meaning without a reference to ultility," for what possible "motive . . . can a man have to pursue the dictates of it" (Bentham 7)? In its radical, utilitarian inflection, Liberalism's strength lies in its unwavering, indeed wholly unreflected commitment to a notion of process as interminable, self-regulating, and essentially non-transparent to the individual agents who advance it. What Max Weber would later scrutinize with growing alarm as the hegemonic role of <em>Zweckrationalit&auml;t</em> in the modern, bureaucratic nation-state already troubles Hegel in 1807. For in constricting the notion of "value" to mean solely a given thing or notion's ability to accommodate an end forever deferred to a hypostatized future, utilitarianism's strictly instrumental concept of rationality treats a given thing as something pure and absolute, to be sure&mdash;albeit only as "absolute <em>for an other</em>." It constitutes "pure insight, not as such, but insight <em>conceived</em> by it in the form of an object." Hegel sees it steeped in an unacknowledged, unreflected, and hence dangerous metaphysics. Impelled by what Charles Taylor has described as the "ethics of inarticulacy," the "punctual or neutral self" on whose opaque agency utilitarianism and liberalism are premised in turn defines its own private pursuits by appealing to a likewise unreflected notion of "utility" as the new and exclusive criterion of value and meaning. Having pared the Aristotelian notion of "ends" down to merely intuited "motives" and fantasized outcomes and mediated both through a strictly formal notion of utility, Bentham's skeletal rendition of classical liberalism can locate utility only in <em>an object</em> outside its punctual agent whose self "is defined in abstraction from any constitutive concerns" and whose "only constitutive property is self-awareness" (Taylor 49). Hence, as Hegel puts it, utilitarianism does indeed constitute a "metaphysics, but not as yet the comprehension of it. [It] is still a predicate of the object, [and] not itself a subject" (Hegel 354).</p>
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<p>Not only does the "bad infinity" (<em>schlechte Unendlichkeit</em>) of utilitarianism instrumentalize all things within a general and unreflected economy of exchange (namely, as accommodating contingent motives with their varying degrees of utility); it also instrumentalizes consciousness itself. Unconstrained by, indeed necessarily opposed to, any normative set of ends or social frameworks, classical liberalism's model of individual, competitive agency understands its flourishing to be premised on the absence of external constraints and obligations and on its positively merging utilitarianism's notions of "instrumentality" and "efficiency." Yet in carving out the space of opportunity by appealing to liberty as the sum total of "rights," classical liberalism forgets that its own ideological justification, too, is driven by historically contingent and ephemeral circumstances. As Alasdair McIntyre remarked some time ago, the language of rights invariably appeals to "the existence of a socially established set of rules" that "only come into existence at particular historical periods under particular social circumstances" (McIntyre 67). Not only does the language of rights manifestly coincide with the rise of economic and political liberalism and utilitarianism, but its putative universality has been reduced to a value-free formalism.</p>
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<p>Invoking the pivotal role of Hobbes, Hannah Arendt thus speaks of a "process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of a never-ending accumulation of capital [that] determined the 'progressive' ideology of the late nineteenth century.. The realization that power accumulation was the only guarantee for the stability of so-called economic laws" established a new conception of history as limitless progress, one that "not only did not want the liberty and autonomy of man, but was ready to sacrifice everything and everybody to supposedly superhuman laws of history" (Arendt 191-192). Aided by the new discourses and methods of speculative dialectics, statistics, probabilistic theory, and an array of evolutionary paradigms, individual agency proves most efficient when least cognizant of the deep structural logic of which it is but one fleeting manifestation. Arendt observes that "public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality through sheer addition. All the so-called liberal concepts of politics . . . simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics" (Arendt 192). If, as Marx put it, "the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development [<em>das Produkt eines langen Entwicklungsganges</em>]" (Marx 1977, 223), the trajectory in question involves the continual recalibration of means and ends whereby initially conceived goals or outcomes, once attained, are treated as the material base for further and equally transient objects of conquest. In such a world, there are no longer any "ends" but only mutations of capital awaiting future investment.</p>
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<p>Inevitably, then, all frameworks and norms had to yield to the iconoclastic and self-certifying rationality of historical and economic progress. It was Marx, above all, who clearly grasped and forcefully articulated how the shift from an intentional to a systemic paradigm of rationality would eventually merge capital with "the species-being of man" and, in so doing, render "both nature and the intellectual faculties of his species into a being that is alien to him" (Marx 1977, 81-82). Nineteenth-century liberalism's conception of historical process as inexorable, instrumental, and self-regulating thus presupposes the constitutive blindness of individual agents to the deep structural significance of their economic, social, and cultural practices and pursuits. Indeed, it is this very <em>non-transparency</em> of the dialectical process to its individual agents&mdash;be it Hegel's "natural consciousness" or Marx's competitive and delusively "free" bourgeois&mdash;that guarantees its forward momentum and eventual articulation as a history of progress. At the same time, such a model leaves its individual agents in a metaphysically precarious and volatile position. Already in his 1844 economic manuscripts, Marx's musing that "the production of human activity as <em>labor</em>&mdash;that is, as an activity wholly alien to itself and non-transparent to consciousness and expressive life alike&mdash;the <em>abstract</em> existence of man as a merely <em>laboring being</em>" carries within itself the perpetual risk that the latter "may on any given day crash down from the determinate nothingness into absolute nothingness, into his social and hence actual non-being."<a href="#1">[1]</a> The lack of any stable, supra-individual framework (an issue to which I'll return at the end of this paper) is the price paid for the intrinsic volatility of capital itself which, as Marx was to analyze in exhaustive detail later on, realizes its local purposes and macro-historical mission by metastasizing into myriad forms, a process facilitated by so many free, competitive, and uncomprehending individuals. Notwithstanding their profound and well-known differences, Hegel and Marx both find in dialectics a logical framework that allows them to articulate the rationality of a supra-historical process&mdash;the plot of freedom&mdash;that can be advanced only by individual agents and only at the price of remaining essentially opaque to them. The advancement of the material narrative of history thus appears to rest on the terminal loss of meta-narrative perspectives now reserved solely for the closeted expertise of "critique."</p>
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<p>For Hannah Arendt, it is this opaque, "unconscious," or "repressed" element, this lack of conceptual and expressive clarity that is positively constitutive of bourgeois liberalism and at the same time accounts for the ideological susceptibility of the so-called "free bourgeois individual" to the totalitarian utopias of the twentieth century. Echoing Marx's analyses and presaging Charles Taylor's critique of liberalism's "ethics of inarticulacy," Arendt thus sees imperialism as the extension of classical economic liberalism, even as this later phase also reveals the entirely partial and self-serving status of modern "rights" and "liberties" within its expansionist master-narrative. It is above all the long shadow of Hobbes that looms large in Arendt's diagnoses of the transition from classical liberalism to bourgeois imperialism and from the Enlightenment's deliberative to utilitarianism's instrumental paradigm of rationality. In what she calls "the conquest of the state by the nation" during the nineteenth century, we find "hardly a single bourgeois moral standard which has not been anticipated by the unequaled magnificence of Hobbes's logic. He gives an almost complete picture, not of Man but of the bourgeois man: 'reason is nothing but Reckoning'; 'a free Subject, a free Will' . . . [are] words . . . without meaning" (Arendt 186). It is here that the full conflict between the operational logic and the public claims, between the grammatical structure and propositional content of liberalism's language of self-legitimation comes into full view. Let me close, then, by adumbrating one particularly forceful instance of anti-Liberal and anti-progressive thinking, namely, Arthur Schopenhauer's 1839 <em>Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will</em>.</p>
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<p>To the official self-image of modern Liberalism&mdash;viz., a progressive, secular nation whose economic expansion and civic progress is driven by literate, industrious, and self-possessed competitive individuals&mdash;Schopenhauer is surely the politically incorrect other <em>par excellence.</em> An essentialist, necessitarian, and neo-Stoic pessimist, Schopenhauer is quick to separate his inquiry from theories of "liberty" and "rights," which "only refers to an <em>ability</em>, that is, precisely to the absence of <em>physical</em> obstacles to the actions of the animal" (Schopenhauer 4). Instead, his 1839 essay focuses on "moral freedom," which concerns the relationship between the will and its rational, self-conscious individual. Once the question becomes whether "the <em>will itself</em> [is] free," the concept of freedom, "which one had hitherto thought of only in reference to the <em>ability to act</em>, [is] now brought in relation to <em>willing</em>" (Schopenhauer 5). The customary assertion of the self-possessed and entrepreneurial self of classical liberalism&mdash;"I can <em>do what I will</em>"&mdash;hardly helps answer the underlying question, namely, "whether the will itself is free" and whether "you can also <em>will</em> what you will" (Schopenhauer 6). Forever secondary and <em>re-</em>active to the primary determinant of the will, self-consciousness can only respond to the affective cues ("repugnance, detesting, feeling, fearing, being angry, hating, mourning, suffering, etc.") that enter "immediately" into it as "something agreeable or disagreeable to the will." It is, as Schopenhauer puts it, "very greatly, properly speaking even exclusively, concerned with the <em>will</em>" (11). For the self-conscious individual to say "I can will, and when I will an action, the movable limbs of my body will at once and inevitably carry it out the moment I will it" is to define freedom strictly as "<em>being able to do in accordance with the will</em>" (14). Yet there's the rub; for even as "self-consciousness asserts the freedom of <em>doing</em> under the presupposition of <em>willing</em>," Schopenhauer reminds us that "what we have inquired about is the freedom of <em>willing</em>" (14). To the extent that it is claimed as an attribute by and for self-consciousness, modern freedom only allows individuals to act in accordance with motives whose appeal to the will is logically prior and hence inaccessible to any deliberation.</p>
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<p>What's more, the entire Cartesian axiom of reflexive, deliberative self-possession&mdash;of rational agents examining and then choosing this or that course of action&mdash;is itself illusory: "to imagine that, in a given case, opposite acts of will are possible . . . [is to] confuse wishing with willing; [people] can <em>wish</em> opposite things, but can <em>will</em> only one of them; and which one it is is first revealed to self-consciousness by <em>the deed</em>" (Schopenhauer 15). While enjoying an "infinitely wider range of view" (30) than the animal, the human agent is free in only the most relative and conditional sense. Driven by motives rather than instincts, the human being can represent to himself the motives whose influence he feels on his will in any order he likes. In this way "he certainly is <em>relatively free</em>, namely from the immediate compulsion of objects that are <em>present through intuition</em>" (31). Yet this does not fundamentally change the determinacy of action by a given motive: "its advantage lies merely in the length of the guiding wire" (31). For to construe the mere absence of a readily identifiable, intuitively present motive as positive evidence of a "free will" is to assert <em>ex negativo</em> the existence of something that will ultimately prove absurd on its own terms. In fact, the axiom of "a free will . . . determined by nothing at all" (8) merely confirms that "clear thinking is at an end," since the proposition in question asserts "an effect without a cause" (40). To make a purely formal appeal to an <em>absent</em> "determinacy" is a meaningless proposition, since to talk of "determination" (or lack thereof) can signify only if the claim itself is acknowledged to have been licensed by a specific framework of possible meanings.</p>
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<p>As Schelling had argued in his 1809 essay on "Human Freedom," some notion of "essence" and "ground" is fundamentally indispensable for the work of philosophy. Although he writes less in the tradition of Boehme than that of Epictetus and Seneca, Schopenhauer echoes Schelling's claim that "in the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will. Will is primordial Being [ <em>Wollen ist Urseyn</em> ]" (Schelling 26). Most famously, of course, it is Schopenhauer who posits the will as the very essence of the human. Inasmuch as "every <em>existentia</em> presupposes an <em>essentia</em>" (Schopenhauer 51), the empirical reality of human (deliberative) action rests on the tacit, indeed inscrutable premise of the "real self, the true kernel of his being; it therefore constitutes the ground of his consciousness, as something absolutely given and existing beyond which he cannot go.. Therefore to ask him whether he could will otherwise than he does is tantamount to asking him whether he could be different from what he himself is; and this he does not know" (18). Characteristically, Schopenhauer drives home this crucial point with a few succinct metaphors, as when he speaks of the will's essential role vis-&agrave;-vis the self-conscious, deliberate human agent: the human agent is "like a crab in its shell" (44), a noble projection encrusted within a primitive hard casing. Flagging the exalted scope and ambition of the intellect (logic, concepts, thoughts, etc.), Schopenhauer cautions that for the self-conscious subject "great brightness and clarity" do indeed present themselves, albeit only "<em>outside;</em> but <em>inside</em> it is dark, like a well-blackened telescope. No principle <em>a priori</em> illuminates the night of its own interior; these lighthouses shine only outward" (19).</p>
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<p>The will thus names every human's unconditional, holistic, and strongly evaluative take on the world. Yet "world" here means not some distinct correlate of perception, deliberation, and a host of intermediate steps taken according to the principle of causality. Rather, it is at all times already something ontologically "given," a "framework" within which alone specific perceptions are able to acquire significance and so delineate possible avenues for human practice. Schopenhauer's entire conception thus is diametrically opposed to Cartesianism's and classical liberalism's ontology of <em>in-der-Welt-sein</em>, which is built on the <em>cogito</em> as a self-originating and supposedly value-neutral point of departure. By premising its concept of "world" (or an all-encompassing framework by some other name) on an originary act of reflexive self-possession, Cartesian epistemology and the political philosophy of classical liberalism revolve a model of agency constituted <em>ex negativo</em>&mdash;that is, defined by the alleged absence of any inner pre-determination. At the same time, that very subjectivity exhibits a fierce commitment to taking possession of a world avowedly "separate" and "indifferent" through its methodical cultivation of skepticism. The modern self is thus defined by its utopian journey towards reacquiring the world it had disavowed on principle, namely, as the determinate "other" of its countless acts of negative predication (i.e., Descartes' <em>dubito</em>). In transposing that pure method to the realm of political economy, the classical liberalism of Locke, Smith, and Hume reconstitutes skeptical prevarication as progressive acquisition. As an inherently temporalized agency, subjectivity in the eighteenth century is plotted as a trajectory of self-creation whose perennially emergent self discovers itself happily to be free from the interference of either inner presuppositions or external constraints.</p>
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<p>Hobbes's dismissive view of the free will as an illusion held two distinct and momentous implications, only one of which liberalism was prepared to acknowledge. He posits that individuals prove acutely responsive to motives long before self-consciousness has the opportunity to grasp and evaluate these motives in the form of intersubjective representations. Conceding the absence of a rational framework <em>a priori</em>, the Scottish political economists and their utilitarian successors thus argue for the self-regulation of reason as a framework that will <em>eventually and involuntarily be distilled</em> from the unchecked pursuit of so many interests and motives. Yet while that projected rational framework operates as a Benthamite fiction or Kantian "regulative idea"&mdash;that is, as a utopia forever deferred&mdash;liberalism also asserts, departing from Hobbes, that the individuals thus enslaved to their contingent motives and interests are nonetheless "free." It credits them with the power of deliberating on and choosing in accordance with nothing but their own interests&mdash;their political "liberties" and "rights" having been guaranteed by the modern nation&mdash;and unconstrained by anything else. In a formal-logical and in a metaphysical sense, this conflation of liberty <em>qua</em> "rational choice" with a freedom that is inscrutably volitional proves at once illogical and dangerous. It is no accident that virtually all of the great nineteenth-century novelists take a jaundiced or ironic view of the prevailing, expedient view of history as the progressive, rational, and dialectically (self-regulating) realization of freedom. More programmatically than Flaubert or George Eliot, Dostoevsky zeroes in on the vexing, not to say terrifying, implications of "freedom" conceived as absolute indeterminacy when, through the grim eloquence of his Grand Inquisitor, he chastises Christ for going "into the world . . . empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear&mdash;for nothing has ever been more insufferable for a man and for human society than freedom! . . . Man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born" (252; 254). According to the Grand Inquisitor, there are only two ways to remedy this dilemma: either focus on the means ("bread") or (quasi-Aristotelian) ends of life: "with bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience&mdash;oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live" (Dostoevsky 254). Schopenhauer's and Dostoevsky's critiques reveal Liberalism's propensity to conflate liberty with freedom and to construction of subjectivity largely <em>ex negativo</em>&mdash;that is, as a strictly formal or pragmatic concept of agency achieved by jettisoning any norms, values, and frameworks that would coordinate the discrete projects of modernity's <em>vita activa</em> with a significant telos<em>.</em></p>
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<p>Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair McIntyre, and Charles Taylor have extended that critique by challenging the methods and assumptions about selfhood in such disciplinary formations as behaviorism, rational-choice theory, or Foucauldian deconstruction. In closing, let me draw attention to Charles Taylor's particularly strident criticism of liberalism's central premise, namely, that any "framework" (including the purely formal, anti-normative project of modern reason) is but a historically contingent, perhaps altogether arbitrary construct realized vicariously through the aggregate effort of so many self-interested, "punctual" selves&mdash;each singular agent understanding his or her project within a world conceived as a value-neutral <em>tabula rasa</em> for an entrepreneurial intelligence. Writ large as the Napoleonic fantasy of <em>l a carri&egrave;re ouverte aux talents</em>, the projects of classical liberalism (of Humboldt, Louis Philippe, Bentham, Mill, Macauley, Gladstone, and Bismarck) invariably proceed from the utopion vision of a harmonious national community in the theoretical future. Since the attainment of that vision pivots on the absence of any actual normative framework and ethical constraint on free agency in the present, economic liberalism in particular accepts pervasive material injustice and social inequality&mdash;indeed the broader reality of historical life <em>tout court</em>&mdash;as a necessarily fluid and inherently provisional state that is not to be constrained by normative commitments of any kind. This "naturalist fallacy," as Charles Taylor calls it, thus dismisses frameworks as</p>
<blockquote>things we invent, not answers to questions which inescapably pre-exist for us independent of our answer or inability to answer. To see frameworks as orientations, however, does cast them in this latter light. One orients oneself in a space which exists independently of one's success or failure in finding one's bearings, which, moreover, makes the task of finding these bearings inescapable. Within this picture, the notion of inventing a qualitative distinction out of whole cloth makes no sense. For one can only <em>adopt</em> such distinctions as to make sense to one within one's basic orientation. . . . The portrait of an agent free from all frameworks rather spells for us a person in the grip of an appalling identity crisis. Such a person wouldn't know where he stood on issues of fundamental importance, would have no orientation in these issues whatever, would not be able to answer for himself on them. If one wants to add to the portrait by saying that the person doesn't suffer this absence of frameworks as a lack, isn't in other words in a crisis at all, then one rather has a picture of frightening dissociation. (Taylor 30-31)</blockquote>
A fundamental challenge to the current field of critical theory, and indeed to literary and cultural studies broadly speaking, is to reflect on the extent of its commitment to the constructivist position that Taylor here critiques. To do so certainly does not entail signing on to Taylor 's project in its entirety (any more than to the partially cognate arguments of Arendt, McIntyre, and Milbank). Yet as the foregoing reflections suggest, a significant body of nineteenth-century writing (novelistic and philosophical) makes a strong case for why it is no longer possible for contemporary critique to predicate its own specialized type of lucidity on the nominalist, constructivist, and individualist model of rationality that classical liberalism had derived from Descartes. As I argue in greater detail elsewhere (Pfau), today's specialized, institutionally embedded, and professionalized mode of intellectual production will likely fail to recognize itself as yet another symptom of a wholly "deregulated" modernity by construing the endless accumulation of new critical perspectives as the practical realization of liberty. Yet the emancipatory gestures of contemporary critique will likely ring hollow for as long as the irrational and ineffable underpinnings of modern "liberty"&mdash;premised on what Schelling called the "non-ground" (<em>Ungrund</em>) of freedom&mdash;remain unexamined.<br /></li>
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<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"></a>1</sup> "Die Produktion der menschlichen T&auml;tigkeit als <em>Arbeit,</em> also als einer sich ganz fremden, dem Menschen und der Natur, daher dem Bewu&szlig;tsein und der Lebens&auml;u&szlig;erung gleich fremden T&auml;tigkeit, die <em>abstrakte</em> Existenz des Menschen als eines blo&szlig;en <em>Arbeitsmenschen</em>, der daher t&auml;glich aus seinem erf&uuml;llten Nichts in das absolute Nichts, sein gesellschaftliches und darum sein wirkliches Nichtdasein hinabst&uuml;rzen kann-wie andererseits die Produktion des Gegenstandes der menschlichen T&auml;tigkeit als <em>Kapital</em> " (Marx, <em>&Ouml;konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte</em>, in <em>Werke</em>, I, 578 [trans. mine]).</p>
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<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Arendt, Hannah. <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.</p>
<p class="hang">Bentham, Jeremy. <em>Principles of Morals and Legislation</em>. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">Dostoevsky, Fyodor. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonski. New York: Knopf, 1992.</p>
<p class="hang">Hegel, G. W. F. <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.</p>
<p class="hang">Marx, Karl. <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <em>Werke</em>, ed. Hans-Joachim Lieber and Peter Furth. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989, 6 vols.</p>
<p class="hang">McIntyre, Alasdair. <em>After Virtue</em>. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1981.</p>
<p class="hang">Milbank, John. <em>Theology and Social Theory</em>, 2nd ed. London: Blackwell, 2006.</p>
<p class="hang">Paine, Thomas. <em>Rights of Man</em>, ed. Eric Foner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.</p>
<p class="hang">Pfau, Thomas. "The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge's Catastrophic Modernity." <em>MLN</em> (forthcoming, 2008).</p>
<p class="hang">Schelling, F. W. J. <em>Of Human Freedom</em>, trans. James Gutman. Chicago: Open Court, 1936.</p>
<p class="hang">Schopenhauer, Arthur. <em>Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will</em>, trans. Eric F. J. Payne, ed. G&uuml;nter Z&ouml;ller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang">Taylor, Charles. <em>Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/pfau-thomas">Pfau, Thomas</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1816" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Liberalism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1834" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Freedom</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1835" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Utilitarianism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1836" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pessimism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1837" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">anti-rationalism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1838" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Decadence</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/charles-taylor-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Taylor</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/isaac-kramnick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Isaac Kramnick</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-paine-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Paine</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/hannah-arendt-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hannah Arendt</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-mann" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Mann</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/arthur-schopenhauer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Schopenhauer</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:43:03 +0000rc-admin14777 at http://www.rc.umd.eduHegel on Buddhismhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/buddhism/morton/morton.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2007-02-01T00:00:00-05:00">February 2007</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/index.html">Romanticism and Buddhism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Romanticism and Buddhism</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>Hegel on Buddhism</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Timothy Morton, University of California, Davis</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">Hegel derived his understanding of Buddhism from a particular sect of Tibetan Buddhism which emphasizes the notion of emptiness. This essay demonstrates the signficance of Hegel's gendered misprision of Buddhism for his thought and for Western philosophy in general, and in particular provides a major reading of the idea of 'nothingness' which Western thought takes to be the content of Buddhist 'emptiness.' This essay appears in _Romanticism and Buddhism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><p class="epigraph"><br/>
The spell is diminished only where the subject, in Hegel's language, is "involved"</p><p class="epigraph">&#8212;Theodor Adorno, <em>Negative Dialectics</em></p><ol><li><p>When Adorno castigates the materialistic consumption of an easily available form of Zen as a "corny exoticism," the decoration of a vacuously uncritical form of modern subjectivity (<em>Negative Dialectics</em> 68), he may not be aware of the extent to which traditional (non-Western) Buddhists may already agree with him. And when he describes genuine self-reflection, the subject meditating upon "its real captivity," he does not note that this is indeed a more genuine form of Buddhist meditation. Moreover, when Adorno approvingly cites the notion of Hegelian "involvement," he appears not to be aware of the irony that such an idea has links to Hegel's encounters with Buddhism (68). Buddhism, then, seems to be on both sides of the equation. How might one begin to account for such a state of affairs? Adorno has Heidegger in his sights, with his (for Adorno) paradoxically reifying view of Being and his concomitant later interest in Zen. Adorno tacks closely to the passage in Hegel's <em>Logic</em> where Buddhism is discussed (119-20). Adorno's argument&#8212;that Heidegger reifies modern subjectivity much as a quiescent Zen produces a fascist modern subject&#8212;would have been even more effective had he been aware of some of the historical and philosophical determinants of reified nothingness. Moreover, this would have enabled an intensification of Adorno's already intensely dialectical account of nothingness and nihilism towards the end of <em>Negative Dialectics</em>, which he associates explicitly with the thought of Schopenhauer (376-81). In a book committed to thought's encounter with what it is not, myopic Western eyes might at least have caught a glimpse of Mahayana Buddhism in the Romantic period. Adorno needed only to have read Hegel on Buddhism more closely. And far from finding models for fascist subjectivity, Adorno would have discovered in Hegel himself a weak, sickly, feminine being, the castoff of a relentless dialectic, the very type of Adorno's own remorseless assault on modern positivity. For in Hegel, Buddhism is the abject body that must be expelled for true subject-object relations to commence. And ironically enough, Buddhism itself would probably agree.</p></li><li><p>In Adorno, what for Hegel was consciousness without content has become "nonconceptual vagary" (68). Hegel's notion of pure consciousness without content aptly theorizes some Romantic-period aesthetic phenomena (Simpson 10). But to what extent does this notion, under scrutiny, undermine the idea of a stable, solid self upon which some of the popular ideas of Romantic art depend (such as the idea of the "egotistical sublime")? Hegel discovered a form of modern consciousness reflected in the Buddhist idea of emptiness, or as he puts it, "nothingness."<a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a> For Hegel, nothingness is a state of pure negation, devoid of positive determinations. It is, therefore, a dialectical dead end, or rather, a horrifyingly stillborn, stunted false start. Staying with this nothingness would not be the same as the "tarrying with the negative" to which he exhorts philosophy in the Preface to the <em>Phenomenology</em>, but a premature retirement of Spirit in a pasture in which, to use his striking image, all cows are black (Hegel para. 16). Nothingness as void is a basic element of Judeo-Christian theology. The concept of nothing or zero is significant in the history of the West: borrowed from Arabic mathematics, zero enables negative numbers, which facilitates double-entry bookkeeping, a cornerstone of capitalism&#8212;zero enables debt, the creation of speculative capital.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a> Nothingness was also destined to become a significant aspect of Romantic and post-Romantic European philosophy. There is no doubt that a careful, slow reading of Hegel's (mis)recognition of nothingness in Buddhism would be of great value.</p></li><li><p>This essay explores something that Hegel tries to hide in plain view, something that he disavows that rests uncannily close to his own philosophical scheme in what Hegel construes as an almost maddening contentment and self-enclosure. Hegel dismisses Buddhism, and in particular, Buddhist meditation, without keeping it utterly out of reach. Indeed, he is unable to jettison Buddhism, even while he is criticizing it, for it provides some key elements of his models for thinking. Despite the way in which it shadows his thought, discussions of Hegel's view of Buddhism have so far tended to be oblique or limited to simple reference.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> There is still rather little on the topic in general, and very little detailed work on Hegel's complex engagement with Buddhist ideas and practices. Here I combine textual, historicist and philosophical analysis to demonstrate that whether Hegel already had what Heidegger calls a "pre-understanding" for Buddhism in his thinking; whether the fragmentary Chinese and Tibetan whispers that reached him from his sources on Buddhism influenced his view; whether he was always already disposed to view emptiness as "nothingness" and Buddhist soteriological practice as <em>Insichsein</em> or "being-within-self" (that is, ultimately without concrete determinants); or whether Buddhism did influence him indirectly; my thesis stands: that there is a remarkable and historically probable collusion between Hegel's view of the nothingness of the in-itself&#8212;or, as first stated in the <em>Logic</em>, Fichte's phrase I = I,<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a>&#8212;and the dominant form of Tibetan Buddhism of which he was aware. And that residing within Hegel's concept of Buddhism, like a toe half-absorbed into a sucking mouth (an image to which we will return), is a gentle lovingness (Sanskrit: <em>maitri</em>) whose objective and sexual status is rigorously, and, for Hegel, threateningly indeterminate.</p></li><li><p>Three sections follow. The first establishes Hegel's view of Buddhism, exploring in particular a key set of texts that explore ideas of nothingness, or emptiness. The second investigates more thoroughly those notions of Buddhist emptiness with which Hegel was familiar. This digression into Buddhist thinking is crucial for my argument, since it demonstrates that Hegel's idea of nothingness drastically reduces emptiness to what Buddhism itself ironically considers a rather substantial <em>thing</em> in which one has to <em>believe</em>. The final section outlines the ways in which Hegel's view of emptiness insufficiently accounts for the different kinds of Buddhist view contemporary with Hegel. The main Buddhist text on emptiness, the Prajnaparamita Sutra (the Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge), is reproduced in an Appendix in its abbreviated twenty-five-line form.</p></li>
<h4>Hegel's Buddhism or, philosophy puts its foot in its mouth</h4>
<li><p>Buddhism had existed in Western writing for a long time before Hegel examined it. Strabo, Marco Polo and Peter Bayle had discussed it; John Toland talked about "the religion of Fo" (Buddha); the travel writer Richard Hakluyt published pictures of yogis (certain kinds of practitioner), though whether they were Hindu or Buddhist is not specified. The Annual Bibliography of English literature lists about forty citations about Buddhism, Tibet and the Dalai Lama in Romantic-period poetry. Thomas Moore, for example, wrote about mantra, Buddha, and Tibetan Lamas.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a> Hegel's direct sources for his view of Buddhism are, primarily, the work of Samuel Turner (1749&#8212;1802), an English researcher who had gained access to the court of the Dalai Lama and his associate the Panchen Lama (the findings were published around 1800); and the sixth and seventh volumes of the encyclopedic <em>Allgemeine Historie</em> on Buddhism (1750).<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a> From the former, Hegel gleaned information about the idea that Lamas were reincarnations of previous Lamas (or high teachers). From the latter, he obtained the concept of "the empty" or "nothing," which is the main focus of this paper.</p></li><li><p>Here is the passage from the <em>Allgemeine Historie</em>:</p><blockquote>Sie sagen, dass das leere oder Nichts, dere Unsang aller Dinge sen; dass aus diesem Nichts und aus der Bermischung [Vermmischung] der Elemente, alle Dinge hervorgebracht sind, und dahin wieder zuruct sehren mussen; dass alle Wesen, sowohl belebte als unbelebte, nur in der Gestalt und in den Eigenschaften von einander unterscheiden sind: in Betrachtung des Ubwesens oder Grundstoffs aber, einerlen bleiben. (6.368)</blockquote><blockquote>They say that mere Nothingness is the basis of all things; that all things are brought out of this Nothing and out of the mingling of the elements, and must tend back there again; that all phenomena, both living and non-living, are only different from one another in form and in superficial properties: upon examination/contemplation of phenomena or basic elements, however, nothing besides remains.</blockquote><p>Note that this is "mere" nothingness. Note also that nothingness is claimed to be "the basis of all things" (not necessarily a universal view, even in Tibet, whence the <em>Allgemeine Historie</em> obtained its information). And note the subtle ambiguity that there is "nothing besides" the phenomena one might analyze. Does this mean that nothingness actually exists "besides" these phenomena? Or does it suggest that all we can possibly experience are these phenomena themselves? We shall return to this. In brief, despite protesting that what he dislikes about Buddhism is the first idea, that nothingness is the basis of all things, what Hegel actually produces, along with many others, is a sense of a positive nothingness that exists alongside phenomena. In strictly Buddhist terms, he becomes guilty of the very nihilism he is berating in what he beholds.</p></li><li><p>In the <em>Logic</em> Hegel makes one explicit remark about Buddhism, and some others that pertain to his understanding of Buddhism in his later lectures on religion. Buddhism plays a consistent role in this body of work. It is a placeholder for a view that must be acknowledged but ultimately surpassed on the onward march towards the full realization of the Notion in Christianity. We could easily blame Hegel for a form of imperialism and stop there, but it will be more revealing to find out what he says, and not only for its parallels with the view to which he was indirectly exposed.</p></li><li><p>In all historical probability, the very people who started the Tibetan whispers, the Gelugpa sect that had been dominant since the mid-eighteenth century, had developed their own form of xenophobia, which manifested both as an intolerance towards outsiders (still evident in some Tibetan teachers' attitudes towards "Westerners" and even those from other Tibetan sects), and as a strict doctrinal discipline. This specific discipline is most legible in the incongruities in Hegel's perception of Buddhism. There is a general understanding of what the Mahayana (of which more later) calls the absolute truth ("nothingness"), fused with a perception of strict Hinayana self-denial, and tinged with the Vajrayana culture of "Lamaism," as Hegel calls it, which would have been highly visible to Samuel Turner. Hegel's Buddhism is a mixture of asceticism, a limited philosophical view of the absolute, and superstition. Hegel does not so much hear as overhear the Gelugpa whispers about emptiness.</p></li><li><p>The Gelugpas (who were and are headed by the Dalai Lama), with their very thorough and gradual path of study, scholarship and debate, would have been loath to dish out anything beyond the strict Hinayana teachings which must be held by all monastic practitioners of whatever level (unlike some of the yogic practitioners associated with other sects in Tibet)&#8212;hence asceticism. Emptiness (nothingness) would have been a general cultural understanding, as the Mahayana view was pervasive in Tibet. Merely being born meant taking refuge vows (taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha or community of practitioners), just as young children in Christian cultures are baptized. Entering a monastery, as every aspiring young man or woman would tend to do, would entail taking the bodhisattva vows of entry into the Mahayana, in which one promises to attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. So most Tibetans would be familiar with what Hegel calls "nothingness" as part of the cultural background. And the Vajrayana, remaining secret even to most of the monks with whom Turner would have come into contact, would be perceived as trappings by a visitor&#8212;the supernatural elements, the idea of incarnate Lamas, the rituals.</p></li><li><p>Paragraph 87 of the <em>Logic</em> describes "Pure" being as "mere abstraction" and "therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just Nothing" (125, 127). Hegel continues:</p><blockquote>Hence was derived the second definition of the Absolute: the Absolute is the Nought. In fact this definition is implied in saying that the thing-in-itself is the indeterminate, utterly without form and so without content&#8212;or in saying that God is only the supreme Being and nothing more; for this is really declaring him to be the same negativity as above. The Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal principal, as well as the final aim and goal of everything, is the same abstraction. (127)</blockquote><p>The talk of nothingness as "the final aim and goal of everything" is evidently derived from the <em>Allgemeine Historie</em>. Hegel here compares what he knows of Buddhism from the <em>Allgemeine Historie</em> with Spinozist and Enlightenment attitudes towards God, that he is a "supreme Being and nothing more." (One should qualify this, however, by recalling Hegel's spirited defense of this view, which he calls a true pantheism, in the section on Buddhism in <em>Religion</em>.) The notes that follow are revealing:</p><blockquote>It is natural too for us to represent Being as absolute riches, and Nothing as absolute poverty. But if when we view the whole world we can only say that everything is, and nothing more, we are neglecting all speciality and, instead of absolute plenitude, we have absolute emptiness. The same stricture is applicable to those who define God to be mere Being; a definition not a whit better than that of the Buddhists, who make God to be Nought, and who from that principle draw the further conclusion that self-annihilation is the means by which man becomes God. (128)</blockquote><p>(Hegel may misinterpret Spinoza's idea of nothingness: Hegel subscribes to a non-Parmenidean, relativistic or <em>meontic</em> form of "nothing," while Spinoza could be said to opt for a more radical <em>oukontic</em> nothing) (Regan 147). If we study the lectures on the philosophy of religion, we will be able to read back into a later passage in the <em>Logic</em>, the beginnings of the section on essence (a dialectical progression from the idea of being), Hegel's understanding of what he means by <em>Insichsein</em> or being-within-self, which is his view of Buddhist practice:</p><blockquote>Unfortunately when the Absolute is taken only to be the Essence, the negativity which this implies is often taken only to mean the withdrawal of all determinate predicates. This negative action of withdrawal or abstraction thus falls outside of the Essence&#8212;which is thus left as a mere result apart from its premisses&#8212;the <em>caput mortuum</em> of abstraction. But as this negativity, instead of being external to Being, is its own dialectic, the truth of the latter, viz. Essence, will be Being as retired within itself&#8212;immanent Being. (162)</blockquote><p>Because it lacks predicates, this apophatic essentiality seems too abstract for Hegel. And yet the way in which he describes inwardness bears the trace of an all too physical materiality. In the <em>Logic</em>, it is a death's head. To imagine Buddhism as a skull would effectively kill it off. But elsewhere Hegel produces a far more uncanny image. Ironically, the image that he chooses to describe Buddhism in <em>Religion</em> is a Hindu one: "The image of Buddha in the thinking posture, with feet and arms intertwined so that a toe extends into the mouth&#8212;this [is] the withdrawal into self, this absorption in oneself" (252). This astonishing image is alarming more in the eyes of the narrator than in itself: babies gleefully suck their toes all the time. But in Hegel's description, it is as if the toe has taken on a horrifying life of its own, wiggling away from the life of totalizing spirit. The toe "extends," it wants to thrust itself down the throat, like one of Francis Bacon's figures disappearing into a keyhole or a washbasin.<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a> Would it have been marginally less disturbing if the mouth had (actively) tried to swallow the toe? The translation captures something of the Cartesian view of matter as sheer extension, so that we cannot tell whether there is a willing subject "behind" the toe's descent into the mouth's wet cavity. The extension of the toe (willed or not? by the mind, or by the toe itself?) is precisely self-annihilating, and pleasurably so. The mixture of sexuality and death could not be harder to miss. Or is it asexual pleasure? Or presexual? This is a precise indeterminacy to which we shall return.</p></li><li><p>The toe sucker is practicing literal, physical introversion. The body turns round on itself and disposes of itself down one of its own holes. To be "retired within itself," Being loses its spiritual or ideal aspect and actually <em>becomes</em> this very image, as in Hegel's telling syntax: "The image of Buddha . . . this [is] the withdrawal into self." Hegel repetitively adds "this absorption in oneself," as if he himself cannot get away from the fascinating, sucking maw. There is a little eddy of enjoyment in Hegel's own text, a sucking backwash that is not simply dialectics at a standstill, but rather an entirely different order of being. This Buddhist being is only recognizable in Hegel's universe as an inconsistent distortion, at once too insubstantial and too solid. Buddhism stands both for an absolute nothingness, a blank zero that itself becomes heavy and dense, unable to shift itself into dialectical gear, and for a substantiality that is not even graced with an idea of nothingness. Contemplation, meditation, is tantamount to reducing the body to a horrifying inertia, a body without organs in the Deleuzian-Guattarian terminology (Deleuze and Guattari 149-66). The nearest approximation is a black hole, a physicality so intense that nothing escapes from it. On the other hand, the image is made of organs rather than a single, independent body. If he is terrified of the static body without organs of the meditating ascetic, in which the inside of the body threatens to swallow all trace of working limbs, perhaps Hegel's description also evokes an even greater panic concerning the possibility of <em>organs without bodies</em>. As one starts to examine the image, nothingness proliferates into a veritable sea of holes. The zero of the open mouth, stuffed full of the body of which it forms a part, while the body curls around in a giant, fleshy zero, like a doughnut: this is the inconsistent, compelling image, the <em>sinthome</em> of Hegel's ideological fixation.<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a> It is ironic, then, that for Buddhist meditators, physical posture is indeed not only a support for meditation, but also embodies it, quite literally, as in the notions of yoga and mudra (gesture), where certain postures enact forms of being awake. These are indeed "thinking postures," to use Hegel's phrase, the textual ambiguity brilliantly (accidentally?) betraying his anxiety about the idea that a <em>posture</em> could <em>think</em>. There must be an infinite distance between <em>posing</em> a philosophical proposition, conceptually <em>positing</em>, and this <em>posturing</em> thought, this thinking that postures and postures that perform thinking. As any Buddhist meditator could have told Hegel, meditation is a highly physical process.</p></li><li><p>As well as being disturbingly feminine (I am reminded of &#934;, Lacan's formula for castration, Phi&#8212;a Greek letter that is like a crossed-out zero, something that is "not even nothing"), Hegel's version of Buddhism is disturbingly infantile: it needs to pull its toe out and start doing dialectics. The image of self-swallowing "stands above the wildness of desire and is the cessation of desire" (252), and also the cessation of predication:</p><blockquote>[Buddhists] say that everything emerges from nothing, everything returns to nothing. That is the absolute foundation, the indeterminate, the negated being of everything particular, so that all particular existences or actualities are only forms, and only the nothing has genuine independence, while in contrast all other actuality has none; it counts only as something accidental, an indifferent form. For a human being, this state of negation is the highest state: one must immerse oneself in this nothing, in the eternal tranquillity of the nothing generally, in the substantial in which all determinations cease, where there is no virtue or intelligence, where all movement annuls itself. All characteristics of both natural life and spiritual life have vanished. To be blissful, human beings themselves must strive, through ceaseless internal mindfulness, to will nothing, to want [nothing], and to do nothing. (253&#8212;4)</blockquote><p>Again, note the way in which Hegel adopts the <em>Allgemeine Historie</em>'s <em>der Nichts</em> in "the eternal tranquillity of the nothing." For Hegel, the Buddhist constantly equates form with mere accidentality, which in itself is "indifferent" nothing. "When one attains this," declares Hegel, putting Buddhism in its place, "there is no longer any question of something higher, of virtue and immortality." Instead, "Human holiness consists in uniting oneself, by this negation, with nothingness, and so with God, with the absolute" (254). Union with God is embodied in extending one's toe into one's mouth in an impossible, fantastic act of self-swallowing, a precise figuration of the paradoxical impossibity of "will[ing] nothing&#8212;want[ing] [nothing], and do[ing] nothing" (the sneer in the tricolon is almost audible). Again, the image of willing nothing is at once vacuously negative and disturbingly positive. Nothingness is threatening because of its inertia as well as its blankness, its "indifferent" refusal to lift the body into the spirit world.</p></li><li><p>At this point in his career, Hegel views Buddhism as even lower in the hierarchy of religions than Hinduism, which proliferates dream-like images of the absolute in all the varied figures of the Hindu pantheon. Later, in revising <em>Religion</em> and in <em>The Philosophy of History</em>, he was to reverse their respective positions.<a href="#9">[9]</a><a name="back9"> </a> Buddhism, more than the Taoism that in his scheme precedes it in its understanding of the absolute, at least grasps that there is something determinate to be recognized and sought, unlike more animistic religions. It is just that what is recognized is still, for Hegel, on a very abstract level, as abstract as the statement "I = I" (<em>Logic</em> 125). Buddhism remains in the position ascribed in the <em>Logic</em> to the doctrine of "Becoming," whose "maxim" is that "Being is the passage into Nought, and Nought the passage into Being" (131). The way Buddhism floats about between more and less primitive stages of religious history is symptomatic of the tremendous anxiety with which Hegel simultaneously teases out and wards off this I = I, this self-enclosing, self-regarding nothingness that barely conceals a positive pleasure, a self-liberating or self-annihilating suction. This pleasurable self-reference might later find a name in narcissism. Without alluding directly to toes extending into mouths, Jacques Derrida opposed the implication that narcissism is a contemptible state. He insisted upon the existence of many differently "extended" forms of narcissism, forms that may or may not be the disturbing self-regard of Hegel's Buddha (Derrida 199). Indeed, in Buddhism, self-regard might be a form of kindness (<em>maitri</em>) rather than selfishness.</p></li><li><p>Hegel is well aware that self-swallowing is paradoxical. After the swallow, there would be no swallower, and no swallowee. That is his point. (Curiously, it is rather close to the Buddhist idea of transcendent generosity, that in truth there is no gift, no giver, and no recipient.) This paradox hides another, deeper one: that of self-pleasuring. This self-pleasuring is the very form of the meditating Buddha, a form Hegel hides out in the open of his text. Is the toe-sucking sexual, or not? Is it an objectal relationship, resembling a relationship of a subject to Melanie Klein's "partial objects"? Are swallower and swallowee the same? Are they different? This indeterminacy is structural, not epiphenomenal. Subject, object and abject are smeared across one another unrecognizably. It looks like the one thing that Hegel finds more frightening than nothingness is this unrecognizable intimacy, this intimacy with the extimate, with what protrudes, such as a toe, and the red, wet, all too human O of the mouth that takes it in. The disavowal of nothingness hides another disavowed, even more denegated and foreclosed thing, the inertia of the self-pleasurer, who after all appears in the form of an inert statue, a self-consuming artifact, the static image of a meditator disappearing into nothing, and/or dissolving into enjoyment. After all, who is to say that there is a person, a sucker, behind all this? The image organizes zones of pleasure rather than a single solid self. In the conclusion, I will re-examine the idea that Hegel's Buddhism has something to say about the objects that we think of as art, objects whose status was becoming highly contested and politicized in his era, as the notion of the aesthetic sought, rather like Buddhism, to reconcile subject and object in a world in which they had been ripped apart.</p></li><li><p>Hegel's thinking about nothing, and about nothing as Buddhism, is of the utmost significance in the history of philosophy: for example, all too briefly, Schopenhauer's view of Buddhism as annihilation of desire; Nietzsche's critique of Buddhism as a consumption of the soul; Heidegger's interest in Zen; the nuancing and critique of "I = I" in Sartre. Aside from their potential political implications for hearing the plight of the exiled Tibetans, the drastically distorted remarks of Slavoj <span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span> on "Western Buddhism" in <em>Critical Inquiry</em> and elsewhere continue the equation of emptiness with nothingness, and nirvana with the realization of this nothingness. Notwithstanding the irony that Lacanian (and therefore Sartrean, and therefore Hegelian) notions of nothingness inform his view of why the Christian legacy is worth fighting for, for <span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span> Western Buddhism is only a hippy form of laziness, lacking the commitment to moral absolutes that he praises in the proclamations of Pope John Paul II.<a href="#10">[10]</a><a name="back10"> </a> Using the zeugma "dust to dust," from the Book of Common Prayer, which resembles Hegel's "I = I" in its circular brevity, <span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span> rubbishes nirvana as "primordial Void" (<span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span> 54). Far from being an originally Buddhist concept, this void is Judaeo-Christian through and through. It is as if, in translation, Buddhism is thought to stop at the mysterious void that pre-exists God's act of creation. Translation yanks emptiness towards the void, then blames it for being nothingness. Though, as I will argue, certain Buddhist views do tend towards nihilism, they by no means justify any action based on the misinterpretation that since everything is empty anyway, one might as well steal or kill. The notion of emptiness is inseparable from compassion. Since reality goes beyond any conceptualization, we can afford to lose a little of our precious territory, our ego-clinging, our sense of a self to which we are holding on for dear life.</p></li><li><p>It is the Prajnaparamita Sutra that Schopenhauer explicitly quotes at the end of the first volume of <em>The World as Will and Representation</em> in declaring that "the point where subject and object no longer exist" is "nothing," a nothing that oscillates between an aestheticized asceticism, an "ocean-like calmness of the spirit," and a more existentially horrific "empty nothingness" (Schopenhauer 411-2). Despite the fact that towards the beginning of paragraph 71, from which these statements are taken, he indicates that nothing can only be a relative entity, not a positive one, Schopenhauer cannot resist imbuing it with a certain charm or horror; despite, one might add, his Kantian insistence on the ways in which aestheticized asceticism transcends desire. Such a paradoxical, ambiguous nothingness is the place at which the Western notion of the aesthetic, itself a reconciler of subject and object, mistakenly meets the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The image of the toe-swallowing meditator is remarkably similar to what De Quincey says about Kant, that in his "aesthetic" self-absorption he was a stomach devouring itself (De Quincey 2.156).<a href="#11">[11]</a><a name="back11"> </a> Schopenhauer's cold nirvana forgets about the pleasure Hegel tries to ward off. According to Buddhism, the universe in which we exist is the <em>desire realm</em>, and thus, since all beings are caught in a dialectic of desire, passion (and com-passion) is a lifeline to enlightenment, because by extending friendliness to oneself and others, one begins to understand that things are not as solid as our habitual tendencies would take them to be.</p></li><li><p>In <em>The Philosophy of History</em> Hegel draws upon more material from Turner's account of the court of the Dalai Lama. Hegel exhibits a horrified fascination concerning the "feminine" education of the young incarnate Lama (Tibetan: <em>tulku</em>) "in a kind of prison" of "quiet and solitude," living "chiefly on vegetables" and "revolt[ing] from killing any animal, even a louse" (171). This vignette is as arresting as the toe-swallowing statue. For a start, here is evidence that Hegel robustly joined the contemporary debate on vegetarianism. For him, vegetarianism is unmanly, as is refraining from killing animals. I am reminded of the portrayal of the Jacobins in the English press as at once both cannibals and vegetarians: the word "revolt" was well chosen by the translator.<a href="#12">[12]</a><a name="back12"> </a> For Hegel, Buddhists eat themselves (toe-sucking) and yet they abstain from carnivorousness, and from virility. As David Clark has shown, masculinity and meat-eating are inextricably intertwined in Hegel.<a href="#13">[13]</a><a name="back13"> </a></p></li><li><p>For Hegel, the capacity to act, to will, has been imprisoned. Hegel goes further here than a simple picture of monastic calm. Aside from walls and doors, quietness and solitude themselves constitute the prison. If we combine this image with that of the toe-sucker, we discover inwardness upon inwardness, self-withdrawal enclosed within self-withdrawal. The Lama's being is locked within another (being-within-self), or even willingly inserted into it, like a toe. The prison of quiet and solitude is practically the external form of the view of nothingness, embodied in the oroboros, the self-swallowing man. Shut away in the monastery, the Lama's very body is his or her prison, a hole inside a hole. And yet the Lama is on display, like a statue. The Lama "does not hold the Spiritual Essence as his peculiar property, but is regarded as partaking in it only in order to exhibit it to others," in a spirit not unlike that of French or American republicanism (171). Hegel must have been disturbed by the extent to which the culture of the Lama uncannily echoed the Europe of absolute freedom and terror, while simultaneously retaining a monarchical structure, an unsynthesized parody of the very state for which he himself argued. Furthermore, his recoil from nothingness is a curious symptom of his unconscious reification of it: if it were really just nothing at all, then why be repulsed? There is evidence here of a denegation, a strong disavowal of the body in its inert, contemplative and "passive," "feminine" mode. <em>Insichsein</em>, then, is a sick form of inwardness. Indeed, Hegel goes so far as to posit inwardness itself as sickness. The horror of the toe-sucker is that he or she has already achieved the union (or dissolution?) of subject and object, before the dialectic has even begun. It is a frighteningly abject version of Hegel's own system, oblivious to the march of History, an astonishingly resilient and resistant form of physical being that preexists the dialectic, standing outside and yet inside at the same time, a state of exception that uncannily resembles Hegel's own devouring and self-devouring dialectic. This has to do with Hegel himself, of course, but it also has to do with the cultural logics of patriarchy and imperialism, in which those who do not have History must have it imposed on them. It has not a little to do with the image of the inscrutable, self-regarding, lazy Oriental. For the British, this role was played by the Chinese, who for De Quincey needed some Western Historical stimulation to wake them up.<a href="#14">[14]</a><a name="back14"> </a></p></li><li><p>To which a Buddhist might reply: yes, indeed, better never to have started the march of History, better never to have become involved in samsara, better to have stayed inert, with one's toe in one's mouth, partaking in nothingness. <span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span>'s harsh words about peaceful states of mind as forms of laziness contain generous helpings of the abject image that Hegelian History had to exempt. <span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span> moves too quickly to cast aside the moment at which Western philosophy got a glimpse of emptiness. It is significant from within the perspective of Marxism itself that at the very start of industrial capitalism and imperialism, an image of absolute tranquility was thrown up out of Orientalist studies of Tibet and China. Writing in <em>Minima Moralia</em> a century and a half later, Adorno corrects a reflex towards seeing production as (painful) labor. Adorno evokes nirvana:</p><blockquote>A mankind which no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusory, futile nature of all the arrangements hitherto made in order to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale. Enjoyment would be affected, just as its present framework is inseparable from operating, planning, having one's way, subjugating. <em>Rien faire comme une b&#234;te</em>, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, "being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment," might take the place of process, act, satisfaction. . . . None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. (Adorno 157)</blockquote><p>"Being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfillment": in Adorno's use of the words of Maupassant we re-encounter Hegel's notion of nothingness. The collapsed, non-grasping surrender which Hegel spurns is raised to the highest power in Adorno. Despite his own proclamations against Buddhism, Adorno remains one of the few philosophers working within Western traditions whose thinking has a flavor that a Buddhist would recognize as sympathetic.</p></li>
<h4>"There is no spoon": sources for Hegel's nothingness</h4>
<li><p>For Hegel, Buddhist nothingness is a false, reified concreteness, a concreteness with, as we have seen, a soft, feminine, abject underbelly. Apparently, there is not enough mediation in meditation. Hegel's sources would have proved no help: the contemporary Gelugpas (and still nowadays, in some cases) could be hostile towards meditation practice, and many have reserved it for a notional point after the completion of one's intellectual studies. Their view of what Hegel is calling nothingness is more popular with Buddhist scholars than with meditators. Ironically, meditators (yogis) were more likely to prefer approaches (such as Cittamatra, discussed below) that could be used as provisional stepping stones (mediations) on the way towards perfect understanding, under the assumption that the owl of enlightenment flies only at dusk. Hegel might even have preferred such views and compared them more favorably with Christianity.</p></li><li><p>I now turn to Tibetan Buddhism's account of so-called "nothingness," a concept (or non-concept?) only visible to Hegel in paradoxical and oxymoronic terms. One very significant aspect of the soteriological practice of Buddhism is the progressive realization of ever more profound views of reality. Understanding what reality is will help to lessen the suffering caused by the grasping and fixation that turns the wheel of samsara or migratory existence (Tibetan: <em>khorwa</em>) round and round. According to Tibetan tradition, the historical Buddha supposedly "turned the Wheel of Dharma" or teaching three times during his life. The teachings comprise two different "vehicles" (Sanskrit: <em>yanas</em>) for taking the practitioner from confusion and suffering to enlightenment: the Hinayana and Mahayana, the latter of which was taught in two different ways. The "first turning of the Wheel of Dharma" is often called the Hinayana, or Shravakayana (Sanskrit) to denote the "hearers" or ordinary practitioners who heard these teachings. The idea is that in his compassion the Buddha expounded the same teaching in three different ways to three different capacities of audience. Still others assert that different types of audience heard the same words in different ways. I use the notion of the "three turnings of the Wheel of Dharma" as a heuristic term that is intrinsic to the schools of thought I investigate here.</p></li><li><p>"Hinayana" (Sanskrit: "narrow vehicle") is the name that Mahayana (Sanskrit: "broad vehicle") Buddhism gave to early traditions of Buddhist doctrine, as practiced for instance by the Theravadins of Southern Asia. I use the term "Hinayana" here in line with the Tibetan Mahayana and Vajrayana (Sanskrit: "indestructible vehicle") traditions of which Hegel was aware. To think of Hinayana as somehow "lesser" is significantly to misunderstand Tibetan views, in which so-called Hinayana discipline is thoroughly incorporated into Mahayana and Vajrayana practices. The Hinayana, or narrow vehicle, is not all that narrow in its view: the narrowness is the immediacy of focus on the individual practitioner himself or herself, the goal being <em>soso tharpa</em> (Tibetan: individual liberation from suffering in samsara). The view of the Hinayana is egolessness. This can be construed first as egolessness of self, in which the self is analyzed into a congeries of phenomenological atoms. Secondly, at least in some forms of Hinayana, one realizes <em>partial</em> egolessness of dharmas (Sanskrit: dharmas here in a second sense, that of elements of reality), consisting of the chain of cause and effect known in Tibetan as <em>tendrel</em> (Tibetan: dependently originated arising; Sanskrit: <em>pratityasamutpada</em>). (This is considered partial egolessness of dharmas from the point of view of the second vehicle, the Mahayana or "broad" vehicle.) In other words, things do not really exist: this glass of water is only made out of bits and pieces of other things, and so are those other things; and the same goes for our actions and thoughts.</p></li><li><p>In the teachings of the "first turning," Buddha's laying out of the Hinayana view, then, there is already some degree of emptiness compared with the habitual notions one has of having a single solid self. Notice that in this view, reality is already not split into subject and object. We are dealing with pieces of phenomenological experience, phenomenological atoms that according to Hinayana scripture occur every sixtieth of a second. These dharmas, or phenomenological atoms, are comprised of a perceiver and a perceived, sense organs and perceptual fields, including the "sense consciousnesses" construed <em>as</em> aspects of consciousness: a rainbow, for instance, depends upon water, sunlight, and a certain point of view. So there is some emptiness here. The view of an Arhat or realized being who has followed the path of the Hinayana, is, according to the Mahayanists, equal to that of a bodhisattva on the sixth bhumi (Sanskrit: level of enlightenment; there are eleven in the Mahayana). For the realized practitioner of Hinayana, grasping ceases, though there is still some subtle fixation on what reality is.</p></li><li><p>The "second turning of the Wheel of Dharma" comprised the Mahayana teachings. Mahayana means "great" vehicle, because its view is proclaimed to be vast and profound: profound because it delves down to the bottomlessness of reality; and vast because it expands to care for all sentient beings throughout all space(s) and time(s). In the Mahayana one takes a vow called the bodhisattva vow, in which one promises to help all other sentient beings to enlightenment before attaining enlightenment oneself, or to attain enlightenment for their sake. Of course, paradoxically, the wish to open up one's resources to other sentient beings is itself very enlightening and one finds oneself enlightened more rapidly than on the Hinayana path of individual liberation. The Mahayana path is based on understanding and realizing the view of emptiness, and of extending one's warmth and compassion towards other sentient beings: giving birth, in order words, to <em>bodhichitta</em> (Sanskrit: "mind of enlightenment"). Even if he had been correct about nothingness, Hegel would still have overlooked the compassion side of this coin.</p></li><li><p>Tibetan Buddhists use the terms <em>trangdon</em> and <em>ngedon</em> to differentiate among the teachings. According to all Mahayanists, the Hinayana view of egolessness is <em>trangdon</em>, that is, a partial view. Now according to some Mahayanists, notably the ones with whom Hegel's sources came into contact (in particular the Gelugpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism, which had assumed political control throughout the eighteenth century), the second turning of the wheel of dharma is fully <em>ngedon</em> or definitive, while the teachings of the third turning are partially <em>ngedon</em>, designed to aid those who had difficulty with the view of emptiness (Tibetan: <em>tongpa-nyi</em>; Sanskrit: <em>shunyata</em>) expounded in the second turning. According to other lineages, for example, the Kagy&#252; and Nyingma sects of Tibetan Buddhism (the Kagy&#252; are headed by the Karmapa, who is their equivalent of the Gelugpas' Dalai Lama)<a href="#15">[15]</a><a name="back15"> </a> the third turning teachings are <em>ngedon</em>, and the second turning partially <em>ngedon</em>. The third turning teachings are often called "luminosity" to distinguish them from the second turning teachings on emptiness, though they are said not to contradict this view, but to complement it. (And from a Kagy&#252; or Nyingma point of view, they complete it.)</p></li><li><p>In <em>The Matrix</em>, that popular classroom teaching aid, the protagonist Neo observes a young boy dressed like a <em>tulku</em> (Tibetan: incarnate Lama). The boy is playing with a metal spoon, supposedly causing it to bend by realizing the truth that in reality "there is no spoon." The boy's words have become an incredibly popular <em>ersatz</em> Buddhist catchphrase. Indeed, it does encapsulate the second turning doctrine of emptiness rather well. It is actually easy to explain the second turning view to readers of literary theory: all they have to do is imagine Derrida's view of language and writing to apply to the whole of reality. Nagarjuna (first to second century AD) was the Indian exponent of the Madhyamaka or "middle way" on which the view of emptiness is based. Nagarjuna did not provide a philosophical view so much as a deconstructive method of reducing to absurdity any argument that asserted something single, lasting or independent about reality (in Buddhism, these three together comprise a view based on "self" or ego). In the manner of Derrida insisting that <em>diff&#233;rance</em> is not a concept, Nagarjuna insisted that anyone who accepted his philosophy as a belief was incurably insane. (Incidentally, it seems strange, from a Buddhist point of view, that scholars are at pains to declare in the titles of their books on deconstruction and religion, notably Buddhism, that they are "healing" or "mending" deconstruction. From a Buddhist point of view, it would have been more apt to say that they are sharpening it or making it tougher&#8212;or just doing it.)<a href="#16">[16]</a><a name="back16"> </a></p></li><li><p>In Tibet the second turning is associated most strongly with Chandrakirti, a student of Nagarjuna, and is known as <em><em>rangtong</em></em>, or emptiness of self, self-emptiness. How is <em><em>rangtong</em></em> different from the egolessness of the Hinayana? In this view, the very tools with which we analyzed egolessness of self have no single lasting independent existence. There is a panoply of Hinayana terms for understanding reality, such as the five skandhas (Sanskrit: "heaps"). These five "heaps" make up a sense of self, in the absence of a real one. They are what the Prajnaparamita Sutra refers to in the phrase "no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness"; then there are the sense organs, the sense consciousness and sense fields.</p></li><li><p>An easy way of understanding the Prajnaparamita Sutra would be to put all the terms in the middle section of the Sutra into quotation marks. "In reality, there is no 'form', no 'feeling', no 'perception'" and so forth. The meaning of the Sutra is summed up in the first declaration of Avalokiteshvara, when he says "Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form [that is, substance and shape&#8212;determination in Hegelese]; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness." If we were to delve into the vertiginous levels of emptiness progressively proclaimed in this chiasmus, this essay would be many times its current length. In brief, the Sutra declares that the very conceptual tools with which the Hinayanists broke down reality are themselves subject to deconstruction: they do not in themselves give rise to a metaphysics of presence. There is no spoon. "Spoon" is just a designation we give to something whose spooniness is a coming together of various causes and conditions, which are themselves empty of inherent existence for the same reason: and the ways in which we break <em>those</em> down, talking about cause and effect, for example, or sense fields, is also subject to deconstruction.</p></li><li><p>Among a great variety of methods, Nagarjuna's student Chandrakirti developed the deconstructive form of argument known as the "tiny vajra" (diamond, lightning bolt, scepter), a mini-Madhyamaka exercise, to show that phenomena cannot be said to arise&#8212;and that therefore they cannot be said to dwell or cease either. Madhyamaka is much more rigorous than atomism. If we said the spoon arose from something else, a non-spoon, then the essence of the spoon would still be caught up in the pre-spoon, and there would be no (single, independent, lasting) spoon. If the spoon came from itself, then it must always have existed, otherwise it would have come from a non-spoon. This is not the case, so there is no spoon. If the spoon came both from itself and from other entities (non-spoons), it would exist and not exist simultaneously, and since this cannot be true, we cannot establish the existence of the spoon on this basis either. If the spoon came neither from itself nor from a non-spoon, then we assert that something can come from nothing, and we have not determined why the spoon is a spoon and not anything else, say a fork. There is no way of establishing that the spoon is single, independent, and lasting. Since for a Berkeley or a Hume ideas could be said simply to be congeries of sensation and designation, one can see how Hegel would have associated Buddhist thought with certain aspects of Enlightenment philosophy; though there are more resemblances between the Madhyamakan view of emptiness and skepticism than there are to Spinozan pantheism.</p></li><li><p>Why did Nagarjuna call his (non)view the middle way, anyway? It is designed to steer a course between asserting that things exist&#8212;in this view, that would be theism, or what Derrida and others call ontotheology&#8212;and asserting that they do not&#8212;that would be nihilism, which for Nagarjuna still implies holding on to a concept, in which case there is a separation of knower and known, and the return of dualism. Nihilism is <em>believing in nothing</em> (in some senses, actually quite impossible). As Adorno puts it, in a devastatingly brief attack on modern chic: "Faith in nothingness would be as insipid as would faith in Being. It would be the palliative of a mind proudly content to see through the whole swindle" (<em>Negative Dialectics</em> 379). One can already see that Hegel's choice of "nothingness" to designate what he understands of emptiness is at least somewhat prey to an accusation that it is truly existent, in the sense of being single, independent and lasting. Hence his view that Buddhism involves the stripping away of all determinants from the self by a rigorous asceticism and (for him) a paradoxical identification with the nothingness. Ironically, the nothingness that Hegel calls the truth of I = I has at least a dash of somethingness.</p></li><li><p>Hegel construes reincarnation as mitigating the potential idolatry of the ways in which Tibetans appeared (and still appear according to current Western media) to "worship a living god" in the form of the Dalai Lama. He is not really a person pretending to be a god, declares Hegel, just a spokesperson (or somewhere between an incarnation and a spokesperson) for nothingness. For all the kinds of cultural superiority such a statement could project, and despite the imperial uses to which such a patronizing generosity could be put, Hegel was not far from the truth. (Incidentally, the inverse misapprehension prevented the Tibetans from converting to Christianity when the first missionaries arrived. In order to describe the risen Christ, they inadvertently used the Tibetan for "zombie"&#8212;literally a body activated by an abstract force&#8212;and failed to impress.) One can tell that Hegel was inspired by the <em>rangtong</em> view in his use of "highest" to describe emptiness: "For a human being, this state of negation is the highest state" (Religion 254). According to the <em>rangtong</em> view, reality in its highest absolute nature is empty: if you saw reality properly the perceptual field would at first dissolve, as it does for Neo at the end of <em>The Matrix</em>; the first bhumi (level) of Mahayana realization is said to be an experience of everything disappearing.<a href="#17">[17]</a><a name="back17"> </a> But in the next view under discussion, emptiness is not the ultimate point of reality, but rather its basis.</p></li>
<h4>There is a spoon: emptiness as basic reality</h4>
<li><p>The reason why things exist at all is <em>because</em> they are empty, but that does not somehow get rid of them. As the 1970s advertisement for shredded wheat put it, this view has nothing added or taken away. In the <em><em>shentong</em></em> or third turning view, reality is indeed beyond conceptualization&#8212;including the subtle conceptualization that holds on to <em>that</em> idea, in whatever form, as a thing to be known. This is what preserves the <em>shentong</em> view from nihilism, and from a certain smugness bred of holding the ultimate philosophical joker up your sleeve. "Shentong" means emptiness of other. In the <em>shentong</em> view emptiness is only the basis of phenomenal appearance. It is associated in Tibet with the Indian teacher Asanga (third to fourth century AD), and with Yogachara, which means basically a school of thought that is helpful to meditators.</p></li><li><p>One might at this point almost declare, "there <em>is</em> a spoon, because it is empty." According to Tsoknyi Rinpoche, a teacher in the Kagy&#252; and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, the reason we can tell this glass of water is empty is <em>because</em> it exists.<a href="#18">[18]</a><a name="back18"> </a> In other words its emptiness is not in spite of its existence. Emptiness is not the ultimate state of the glass; it is the basis for the glass's existence. To extend the analogy with deconstruction, <em>diff&#233;rance</em> by no means abolishes the distinctions between signs; <i>pace</i> one of my literary theory undergraduates who wrote about deconstruction being a "communistic" theory that reduced distinction to absolute lack of determination&#8212;just a huge vague soup of non-meaning, in which everything means nothing to an equal extent.</p></li><li><p>To the uneducated ear the <em>shentong</em> view almost sounds like a version of idealism, or perhaps even solipsism, especially as it is full of phrases such as "the clear light nature of mind," which could also easily be read as a form of theism. This is indeed how it sounds to certain Tibetans, notably those with whom Hegel's sources came into contact. Another contemporary Tibetan teacher, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso of the Kagy&#252; lineage, writes that "Because <em>Shentong</em> makes the same distinction between the three natures as the Cittamatrins do, and because it stresses the true existence of the luminous knowing aspect of mind, many Rangtong masters have confused it with the thought of Cittamatra" or "mind-only" (Tibetan: <em>semtsam</em>) (Gyamtso 76). This is another way in which Hegel, following the <em>rangtong</em> view and being himself an idealist, could have become confused about the <em>shentong</em> view; indeed, one of Hegel's indirect sources, Alexander Csoma de Koros, was puzzled on this very point. One must here recall that the Cittamatra view itself goes beyond the pantheism of the Coleridgean and Wordsworthian "one life within us and abroad": the kind of pantheism that Hegel benignly defends in his closing remarks in the section on Buddhism in <em>Religion</em> (260&#8212;3). Cittamatra certainly has no tendencies towards either pantheism or solipsism&#8212;why? Because we have already overcome a sense of self in the Hinayana, whose view is egolessness; it does not somehow get to come back. The mind-only view is very helpful in resolving our concepts about the dualism of inside and outside: "All our concepts are based on accepting outer objects as separate from the inner perceiving mind and taking them to be real." Mind-only, in which all phenomena are perceived as more or less real existents of mind, answers the question of "How does the interface of mind and matter actually work?" (Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso 50).</p></li><li><p>"However," continues Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, "there are very important differences between Cittamatra and <em>Shentong</em>. Firstly, <em>Shentong</em> does not accept the Cittamatra view that consciousness is truly existent. [It] hold[s] the Madhyamaka view that it is non-arising and without self-nature. They consider themselves to be the Great Madhyamikas because their system involves not only recognizing freedom from all conceptual contrivance, but also the realization of the Wisdom Mind (Jnana) that is free from all contrivance" (96). From this standpoint, knowing reality as something to be known is still a form of objectification, howsoever subtle. The Buddhist path first emphasizes clearing away gross obstacles to the proper view: the <i>kleshas</i> or afflictive mental states (anger, jealousy, pride and so forth). This helps to eliminate the "grasping" that is one aspect of the Third Noble Truth (the Noble Truths are common to all schools of Buddhism). Then the practitioner must deal with "fixation," the mind's compulsion to hold on to things, informed by more subtle misconceptions. Thus the Hinayana is oriented towards working on the self; the Mahayana towards working with the other (and with otherness).</p></li><li><p>From the <em>shentong</em> point of view the <em>rangtong</em> tends towards nihilism&#8212;a paradoxical (and ultimately untenable) <em>belief</em> in <em>nothing</em>; the idea of emptiness in the <em>rangtong</em> is still somewhat conceptual&#8212;it is precisely the idea that no concept can be applied to the notion of emptiness; in other words it is paradoxically not fully nonconceptual. Reality is empty, but not of the qualities of a Buddha, transcendent intelligence, wisdom and compassion: luminosity. Remember that the subject/object dualism has long been surpassed. So what we are dealing with here is a self-luminous reality, beyond conceptualization, endowed with all the qualities of a Buddha. After which point, in Buddhism, there is only poetry, the direct proclamation of enlightened mind otherwise known as Vajrayana.</p></li><li><p>The <em>shentong</em> view of luminosity and Buddha-nature strikingly resembles David Clark's observation on Schelling's view of the Behmenist <em>Ungrund</em> in his essay on Jean-Luc Marion's <em>God without Being</em>: "the <em>Ungrund</em> is contaminated <em>from the start</em> by the universe it subtends, making the impulse to misrecognize the groundless as the primal ground, and thereby firmly reappropriate it to ontotheology, quite irresistible"; "the <em>Ungrund's</em> non-being is neither the void of nothingness nor the nonsense of non-entity," so that the question then becomes how to avoid speaking of it, or as Derrida, quoted in Clark, observes: "'how, in speaking, not to say this or that, in this or that manner? . . . How to avoid . . . even predication itself?'" (Clark 161-2).</p></li><li><p>Buddhism is less tongue-tied than this: reality has all the qualities of a Buddha, wakefulness, intelligence, compassion&#8212;attributes which are often called "luminosity" to distinguish it from sheer lack of existence. What we are constantly forgetting in our fascination with emptiness, especially as intellectuals&#8212;a fascination reminiscent of Sartre's formulation, in which, as a matter of fact, it is we who are the nothingness and the in-itself that is the being&#8212;"like a gigantic object in a desert world" (as Sartre puts it)(246)&#8212;what we are forgetting here, in our fixation, is precisely the original nonseparation of subject and object&#8212;what Buddha nature is seeing is precisely Buddha nature. There is nothing to be seen because the difference between seer and seen has been transcended. In fact, any slight introduction of such a difference would entail a legitimate attack from the <em>rangtong</em> or prasangika Madhyamaka view, and rightly so too. To read Hegel from the standpoint of Buddhism, this difference stems from the fascination with which Hegel regards the big fat zero of the toe-sucking meditator. It is a nothing that is not even nothing, that hides a something, an irrepressible gentleness perhaps, which Hegel would call feminine and which Buddhism would call bodhichitta, the mind of enlightenment, the genuine heart of sadness.</p></li><li><p>In their apophatic anxiety to speak nothing and nothing more, many writers on the topic of emptiness fall into the mode of Jeremy in <em>Yellow Submarine</em>&#8212;a poor creature whose scholarship leaves him a nowhere man who "hasn't got a point of view" (The Beatles). This is not quite enough to inspire the practitioner, according to the Kagy&#252; and Nyingma sects of Tibetan Buddhism. There is surely something of this in Adorno's marshalling of the medieval apophatic tradition with the Buddhist view of nirvana (however distorted) against Nietzschean nihilism, which supplies fascism with "slogans": "The medieval <em>nihil privativum</em> in which the concept of nothingness was recognized as the negation of something rather than as autosemantical, is as superior to the diligent 'overcomings' as the image of Nirvana, of nothingness as something" (380). The <em>rangtong</em> is traditionally said to be good for academics, who like tying themselves in knots&#8212;or think that they can untie them and will worry at them incessantly until they themselves disappear (Magliola 102). It is a shame that Buddhism has been construed in the West to imply a view that ultimate reality is nothingness or absence of determination. Buddhist intellectuals still have work to do to correct the distorted picture of Buddhism that has become a complacently unexamined commonplace in some postmodernist intellectual circles, which have simply received without question the (pessimist and nihilist) assessments of Buddhism transmitted by such thinkers as Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.</p></li><li><p>The point of all three turnings is to help sentient beings become more compassionate and kind to themselves and others, in part by realizing that there was never much in the first place to hold on to in the way of the territory of selfhood. The "self" that <em>Insichsein</em> is "within" never had that much existence anyway; there was not much A for A to equal itself, a point taken up in Wittgenstein, and in Derrida on the copula.<a href="#19">[19]</a><a name="back19"> </a> For a Buddhist, to say that emptiness is absence of determination is a determination. Hegel's view of emptiness as nothingness is, from the Buddhist point of view, an error that had profound consequences not only for the reception of Buddhism in the West, but for the history of continental philosophy to come, and it was also useful in constructing a historical narrative that promotes Christianity at Buddhism's expense.</p></li><li><p>To study Hegel's Buddhism is to call for a re-examination of issues in Hegel's aesthetics that would take his fascinating, abject image of the Buddha into account. On the one hand, "the primitive artistic pantheism of the East" appears to jam together the two halves of art, nature and idea, as "unsuitable" and opaque to one another. Thus are produced forms that cannot adequately bear their content, either becoming "bizarre, grotesque and tasteless" (rather like Hegel's view of the proliferating dreams of Hinduism), or turning "the infinite but abstract freedom of the substantive Idea disdainfully against all phenomenal being as null and evanescent," rather like his view of Buddhism (Hegel 83). In the <em>Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics</em> Hegel was keen to criticize the idea of God as merely "<em>One</em>, the supreme Being as such": in this formula "we have only enunciated a lifeless abstraction of the irrational understanding" (77). On the other hand, the inwardness of the Romantic art form is analogous to a pure "consciousness of God . . . in which the distinction of objectivity and subjectivity is done away" (90). Could the inwardness with which Hegel characterizes Buddhism have anything to do with this, or is it merely to be construed as marginal to Hegel's thought? Hegel appears disturbed by the notion of irony: a sense of "the nothingness of all that is objective" which gives rise to a "sickly" form of "quiescence and feebleness&#8212;which does not like to act or to touch anything for fear of surrendering its inward harmony." Hegel here offers what could later be used as a critique of his student Schopenhauer, whose fusion of Buddhism and the aesthetic presents just such a "morbid saintliness and yearning," based on an "abstract inwardness (of mind)," a "retirement into itself" (73). Surely there is an echo of this in the Buddhism of <em>Insichsein</em>? And could what Hegel says about irony, that most Romantic of tropes, be isometric with his view of Buddhism and in particular, Buddhist meditation practice?</p></li><li><p>Despite his wish to eject it from the path of the dialectic, to leave it sucking its toe at the doorstep of History, the big, fat zero, the feminine body of the meditator, contemplation embodied, the body whose image is its concept, the <em>thinking posture</em>, an abject version of artistic harmony, reappears in the moment of irony, the quintessence of contemporary art. A Hegelian reading of Romantic art, then, would necessarily consist of reflections on Buddhadharma, however obliquely, and moreover, Romantic art itself embodies a certain Buddhism. There is a secret passage between the vertigo of irony, and the oceanic pleasure of lovingness, <em>maitri</em>, imagined in the form of a statue whose toe extends into its mouth. Never fully digested into Hegel's scheme, finding itself at the start, or is it outside, or is it just inside, the dialectical process, Buddha nature, the I = I, which is also zero, which is also a body ingesting itself, haunts Hegel's text like the melancholy echo of a fully embodied emptiness suffused with longing and compassion, which is, in fact, what it actually is.</p>
<h4><a name="#appendix">Appendix</a></h4>
<p>The Prajnaparamita Sutra in twenty-five lines. (There are various versions, both larger than this and much smaller.) My insertions in square brackets. Translated into Tibetan by Lotsawa bhikshu [monk] Rinchen De with the Indian pandita [scholar] Vimalamitra. Translated into English by the Nalanda Translation Committee, with reference to several Sanskrit editions.</p>
<h4>The Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge.</h4>
<p>Thus have I heard. Once the Blessed One was dwelling in Rajagriha at Vulture Peak mountain, together with a great gathering of the sangha of monks and a great gathering of the sangha of bodhisattvas. At that time the Blessed One entered the samadhi [meditation state] that expresses the dharma called "profound illumination," and at the same time noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva [great bodhisattva], while practicing the profound prajnaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five skandhas to be empty of nature.</p><p>Then, through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra said to noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, "How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita?"</p><p>Addressed in this way, noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, said to venerable Shariputra, "O Shariputra, a son or daughter of noble family who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita should see in this way: seeing the five skandhas to be empty of nature. Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness. Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no touch, no taste, no dharmas; no eye dhatu ["space," capacity] up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no nonattainment. Therefore, Shariputra, since the bodhisattvas have no attainment, they abide by means of prajnaparamita. Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear. They transcend falsity and attain complete nirvana. All the Buddhas of the three times, by means of prajnaparamita, fully awaken to unsurpassable, true, complete enlightenment. Therefore, the great mantra of prajnaparamita, the mantra of great insight, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequalled mantra, the mantra that calms all suffering, should be known as truth, since there is no deception. The prajnaparamita mantra is said in this way:</p><p style="text-align: center">OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA</p><blockquote>[oh beyond, beyond, completely beyond, beyond all concept of beyond, awake, so be it]</blockquote><p>Thus, Shariputra, the bodhisattva mahasattva should train in the profound prajnaparamita."</p><p>Then the Blessed One arose from that samadhi and praised noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, saying, "Good, good, O son of noble family; thus it is, O son of noble family, thus it is. One should practice the profound prajnaparamita just as you have taught and all the tathagatas will rejoice."</p><p>When the Blessed One had said this, venerable Shariputra and noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, that whole assembly and the world with its gods, humans, asuras [jealous gods], and gandharvas [musicians of the gods] rejoiced and praised the words of the Blessed One.</p></li></ol>
<span class="indent"><i>For their generous help and
encouragement, I would like to thank David Clark (whose
kindness is legible throughout the text), Jeffrey Cox, Mark
Lussier, and the anonymous reader for Romantic Praxis. A
version of this essay was presented at the University of
London on 3 May 2002; in particular, I would like to thank
Elizabeth Eger, Markman Ellis, Emma Francis, and Annie
Janowitz for their helpful observations on this
occasion.<br /></i></span>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Adorno, Theodor. <em>Negative Dialectics</em>. Trans. by E. B. Ashton. New York: The Seabury Press, 1973.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. "Sur l' eau." <em>Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life</em>. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London and New York: Verso, 1978. German Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951. 155-7.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">The Beatles. <em>Yellow Submarine</em>. Dir. George Dunning. MGM. 1968.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Burbridge, John. "Is Hegel a Christian?" <em>New Perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Religion.</em> Ed. David Kolb. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 93-107.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Clark, David. "Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy." <em>Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism</em>. Ed. Timothy Morton. London and New York: Palgrave, 2004. 115-40.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. "Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion." <em>Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature</em>. Ed. Phillip Leonard. London: Macmillan, 2000. 136-76.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. "We Other Prussians: Bodies and Pleasures in De Quincey and Late Kant." <em>European Romantic Review</em> 14 (2003): 261-87.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Cyril O' Regan. <em>The Heterodox Hegel</em>. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Deleuze, Gilles. <em>Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.</em> Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Deleuze, Gilles and F&#233;lix Guattari. "November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" <em>A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</em>. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">De Quincey, Thomas. <em>The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey</em>. Ed. David Masson. 14 vols. London: A. and C. Black, 1896.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Derrida, Jacques. <i>Of Grammatology</i>. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Dumoulin, Heinrich. "Buddhism And Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy." <em>Journal of the History of Ideas</em> 42 (1981): 457-70.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Dupr&#233;, Louis. "Transitions and Tensions in Hegel's Treatment of Determinate Religion." <em>New Perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Religion.</em> Ed. David Kolb. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 81-92.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Gyamtso, Ven. Khenpo Tsultrim. <em>Rinpoche, Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness</em>. Trans. Shenphen Hookham. Oxford: Longchen Foundation, 1986, 1988.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. <em>Hegel's Logic</em>. 1873. Forward J. N. Findlay. 3rd Edition. Trans. William Wallace. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. <em>Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. <em>Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics</em>. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. Ed. and intro. Michael Inwood. Harmdondsworth: Penguin, 1993.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang"><em>---. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion</em>. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Tr. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. <em>The Philosophy of History</em>. Tr. J. Sibree. Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator. New introduction by C. J. Friedrich. New York: Dover Publications, 1956.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Jamros, Daniel P. <em>The Human Shape of God: Religion in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.</em> New York: Paragon House, 1994.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Kaplan, Robert. <em>The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero.</em> Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Leask, Nigel. <em>British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire.</em> Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Liberman, Kenneth. "Negative Dialectics in 'Madhyamika' and the Continental Tradition." <em>East-West Encounters in Philosophy and Religion.</em> Ed. Ninian Smart. Long Beach: Long Beach, 1996. 185-202.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Loy, David, ed. <em>Healing Deconstruction: Postmodern Thought in Buddhism and Christianity</em>. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1966.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Magliola, Robert. "In No Wise is Healing Holistic: A Deconstructive Alternative to Masao Abe's 'Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata'." <em>Healing Deconstrcution</em>. Ed. by David Loy. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1966. 99-118</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang"><em>The Matrix</em>. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Warner Brothers, 1999.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Mipham, Sakyong, Rinpoche. Public lecture. Sutrayana Seminary, 1999.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Morton, Timothy. <em>Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World.</em> Cambridge and New York: 1994; paperback, 2006.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Sartre, Jean-Paul. <em>Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology</em>. Trans. and ed. Hazel Barnes. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1956, 1969.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Schopenhauer, Arthur. <em>The World as Will and Representation</em>. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Simpson, David. "Romanticism, Criticism and Theory." <em>The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism</em>. Ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 1-24.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Public lecture. Boulder Shambhala Center, August 1998.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">Wittgenstein, Ludwig. <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.</em> Trans. C.K. Ogden. Introduction by Bertrand Russell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang"><span class="indent">&#381;i&#382;ek</span>, Slavoj. "Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?" <em>Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion</em> London: Verso, 2001, 52-4.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. <em>The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?</em> London and New York: Verso, 2000.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. <em>Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.</em> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, 1992.</p><p style="text-align: left" class="hang">---. "Melancholy and the Act." <em>Critical Inquiry</em> 26.4 (Summer, 2000): 657-81.<br/></p></div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> For recent work on Hegel and Buddhism, see Kenneth Liberman, "Negative Dialectics in 'Madhyamika' and the Continental Tradition," pp. 185-202, and Heinrich Dumoulin, "Buddhism and Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy," pp. 457-70.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> See Robert Kaplan, <em>The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero</em>.<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> See for example Louis Dupr&#233;, "Transitions and Tensions in Hegel's Treatment of Determinate Religion," pp. 81-92, esp. 84, 92; John Burbridge, "Is Hegel a Christian?", 93-107, esp. 104.<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Attributed to Fichte in <em>Vorselungen &#252;ber die Geschischte der Philosophie</em>; see Daniel P. Jamros, <em>The Human Shape of God: Religion in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit</em>, 126.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> In <em>The Fall of Hebe, Fum and Hum,</em> and <em>Tout Pour la Tripe</em>.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> Hegel was also somewhat familiar with the following indirect sources: Jean Pierre Abel-R&#233;musat; de Koros; <em>Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande; oder, Sammlung aller Reisebeschreibungen</em> (Leipzig, 1750), vols. 6, 7; Samuel Turner, "Copy of an Account Given by Mr. Turner, of His Interview with the Teshoo Lama at the Monastery of Terpaling, Enclosed in Mr. Turner's Letter to the Honourable the Governor General, Dated Patna, 2d March, 1784," in <em>Asiatic Researches</em> 1:197-205; "An Account of a Journey in Tibet," in <em>Asiatic Researches</em> 1:207-220; <em>An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, in Tibet: Containing a Narrative of a Journey through Bootan, and Part of Tibet</em> (London, 1800), which Turner dedicated to the East India Company. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, <em>Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion</em>, 265 n. 183, 185, 266 n. 188, 504-5.<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> See Gilles Deleuze, <em>Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation</em>.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> The term is a pun on the Apostle Thomas, who had to insert his fingers into the gaping wound in the side of the risen Christ, who had returned to convince Thomas of His reality. For Lacan, the sinthome is neither symptom nor fantasy but "the point marking the dimension of 'what is in the subject more than himself' and what he therefore 'loves more than himself'" (&#381;i&#382;ek, <em>Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture</em>, 132.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, <em>The Philosophy of History</em>.<br/><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> See Slavoj &#381;i&#382;ek, "Melancholy and the Act," 657-81, esp. 674-7; see also <em>The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?</em>, esp. 23, 27-40, 128, 166-7.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="11"> </a>11</sup> See David Clark, "We Other Prussians: Bodies and Pleasures in De Quincey and Late Kant," 261-87.<br/><a href="#back11">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="12"> </a>12</sup> See Timothy Morton, <em>Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World,</em> 13-56.<br/><a href="#back12">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="13"> </a>13</sup> See David Clark, "Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy," 115-40.<br/><a href="#back13">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="14"> </a>14</sup> See Nigel Leask, "Murdering One's Double: Thomas de Quincey and S.T. Coleridge," 170-228.<br/><a href="#back14">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="15"> </a>15</sup> For political reasons the Dalai Lama has assumed greater control over the Tibetan nation as the oppression of the Chinese has continued. Also to be factored into this discussion should be an understanding of the Ri-me or unbiased lineage, started by Jigme Lingpa (1730-1798), which had roots earlier but started to come into prominence in the nineteenth century. This nonsectarian approach has stressed the wisdom inhering in all schools of Buddhism.<br/><a href="#back15">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="16"> </a>16</sup> See David Loy, ed., <em>Healing Deconstruction: Postmodern Thought in Buddhism and Christianity</em>: a title whose double meaning is still singular. See also Robert Magliola, <em>Derrida on the Mend</em>.<br/><a href="#back16">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="17"> </a>17</sup> Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Sutrayana Seminary, 1999.<br/><br/><a href="#back17">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="18"> </a>18</sup> Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Boulder Shambhala Center, August 1998.<br/><a href="#back18">Back</a></p><p class="indent"><sup><a name="19"> </a>19</sup> See Ludwig Wittgenstein, <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</em> (5.5303), and Jacques Derrida, <em>Of Grammatology</em>.<br/><a href="#back19">Back</a><br/><br/></p></div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/morton-timothy">Morton, Timothy</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/derrida" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Derrida</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1465" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">deconstruction</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/665" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Buddhism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/alexander-csoma-de-koros" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alexander Csoma de Koros</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/682" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orientalism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/686" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tibet</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/693" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">enlightenment</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/hegel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hegel</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/696" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">philosophy</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/zizek" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Zizek</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/698" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">emptiness</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/699" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">nothingness</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/700" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">diet</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/adorno" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Adorno</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/sartre" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sartre</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/schopenhauer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Schopenhauer</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/hume" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hume</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/nagarjuna" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nagarjuna</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/706" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">rangtong</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/707" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">shentong</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/dalai-lama" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dalai Lama</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/tsoknyi-rinpoche" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tsoknyi Rinpoche</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/mipham-rinpoche" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mipham Rinpoche</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/711" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dharma</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/712" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Buddha</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/713" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Buddhists</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/714" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">luminosity</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/715" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">prajna</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/716" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Prajnaparamita Sutra</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/717" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">meditation</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/marco-polo" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Marco Polo</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/719" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Fo</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/panchen-lama" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Panchen Lama</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/721" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Allgemeine Historie</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/722" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hinayana</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/723" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mahayana</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/724" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vajrayana</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/samuel-turner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Turner</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/spinoza" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spinoza</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/727" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hinduism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/melanie-klein" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Melanie Klein</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/pope" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pope</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/thomas-de-quincey" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas de Quincey</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/country/china-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">China</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/733" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cittamatra</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/734" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Yogachara</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/735" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gelugpas</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/736" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kagyu</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/737" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nyingma</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/738" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sanskrit</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/chandrakirti" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Chandrakirti</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/740" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Matrix</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/asanga" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Asanga</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/742" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nirvana</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/samuel-turner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Turner</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/arthur-schopenhauer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Schopenhauer</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/timothy-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Timothy Morton</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jacques-derrida" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jacques Derrida</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/martin-heidegger" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Martin Heidegger</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/tibet" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tibet</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/california" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">California</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:28:59 +0000rc-admin16357 at http://www.rc.umd.eduRomanticism and Buddhismhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/buddhism/index.html
<div class="field field-name-field-index-banner field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-index-banner" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/styles/index_banner/public/buddhism_banner%5B1%5D.jpg?itok=HyLEWrJq" width="640" height="213" alt="Romanticism and Buddhism, Edited by Mark Lussier" title="Romanticism and Buddhism, Edited by Mark Lussier" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="IndexContent">
<h2 class="TOC">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul id="TOCContent">
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/about.html">About this Volume</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/lussier/lussier.html">"Enlightenment East and West:
An Introduction to Romanticism and Buddhism"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Mark Lussier, Arizona State University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/abstracts.html#lussier">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/buddhism/lussier/lussier.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/rudy/rudy.html">"Shelley's Golden Wind: Zen Harmonics in <i>A Defence of Poetry</i>
and 'Ode to the West Wind'"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">John G. Rudy, Indiana University Kokomo</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/abstracts.html#rudy">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/buddhism/rudy/rudy.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/economides/economides.html">"Blake, Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology: A Fourfold Perspective on Humanity's Relationship to Nature"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Louise Economides, University of Montana</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/abstracts.html#economides">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/buddhism/economides/economides.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/mccort/mccort.html">"Kafka and the Coincidence of Opposites"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Dennis McCort, Syracuse University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/abstracts.html#mccort">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/buddhism/mccort/mccort.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/morton/morton.html">"Hegel on Buddhism"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Timothy Morton, University of California, Davis</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/abstracts.html#morton">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/buddhism/morton/morton.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/dubie/dubie.html">"The Tantric Master, Lord Marpa,
Twice Dreamt of the Prophet, William Blake"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Norman Dubie, Arizona State University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/abstracts.html#dubie">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/buddhism/dubie/dubie.html">Poem</a></li>
</ul>
</div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2007-02-01T00:00:00-05:00">February 2007</span></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-edited-by field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Edited By:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:EDT"><a href="/person/lussier-mark">Lussier, Mark</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-technical-editor field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource Technical Editor:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/byrne-joseph">Byrne, Joseph</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/george-bogle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Bogle</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/eugene-burnouf" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eugene Burnouf</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/673" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bodhisattva</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1286" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">colonialism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/675" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">East India Company</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/brian-houghton-hodgson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Brian Houghton Hodgson</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/677" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/sir-william-jones" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sir William Jones</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/alexander-csoma-de-koros" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alexander Csoma de Koros</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/680" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nepal</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-nietzsche" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Nietzsche</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/682" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orientalism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/sangye-puntsog" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sangye Puntsog</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/684" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Romanticism and Buddhism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/arthur-schopenhauer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Schopenhauer</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/686" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tibet</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource (Taxonomy):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/praxis-series/romanticism-and-buddhism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Romanticism and Buddhism</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:28:57 +0000rc-admin16351 at http://www.rc.umd.eduLussier, "Enlightenment East and West: An Introduction to Romanticism and Buddhism"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/buddhism/lussier/lussier.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2007-02-01T00:00:00-05:00">February 2007</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/index.html">Romanticism and Buddhism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Romanticism and Buddhism</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>Enlightenment East and West:<br/>
An Introduction to Romanticism and Buddhism</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Mark Lussier, Arizona State University</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">Rather than summarizing the essays appearing in this special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis, this introductory essay provides a historical context for the emergence of what is now termed 'Buddhism' into European consciousness during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This essay appears in _Romanticism and Buddhism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><p class="epigraph"><br/>
"Like some recent philosophers of the West, I needed to turn myself toward the East in order to find guides and basic principles of method. . . . I followed the teaching of masters for whom a daily practice&#8212;in fact, yoga&#8212;was what could help awaken or reawaken and discover words and gestures carrying another meaning, another light, another rationality."<br/><br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Luce Irigaray, <i>Between East and West</i></p><p class="epigraph">"The true artist, monk, and scientist are not searching to grasp knowledge as object, but rather as event."<br/><br/>
&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Arthur Zajonc, <i>Catching the Light</i></p><ol><li><p>The topic of the following volume, <i>Romanticism and Buddhism</i>, has a relatively short history worth brief consideration relative to the intellectual and spiritual energies expressed in the epigrams by Luce Irigaray and Arthur Zajonc. Like Irigaray, my open and broad inquiry emerged from a coincidence of particular practices and theoretical interests where the fissures cut into consciousness by culture re-fuse division to "reawaken and discover words and gestures carrying another meaning." Like Zajonc, my experience of "knowledge" as dynamic "event" (where "Events in Time" issue forth from the space between "a Pulsation of the Artery" [Blake, <i>M</i> 29.2; E 127]), fleeting though it might be, united the personal and professional in ethical commitments (the "pleasure" of knowledge Wordsworth evokes in the 1802 "Preface" to <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> and in language quite compatible with Zajonc [606]). The experience evoked by Irigaray and Zajonc occurs at the spacetime coordinates termed self and represents the continuum where "knowledge [is an] event" through which consciousness "reawakens" to "another meaning, another light, another rationality." This sounds to me as good a description of "enlightenment" as any other, and what Irigaray and Zajonc voice fits well with the definitions of enlightenment current at the beginning of the Romantic period and conveniently codified by Dr. Johnson in 1756: "To quicken in the faculty of vision," "to furnish with encrease [sic] of knowledge," and "to illuminate with divine knowledge" (239). At the beginning of the last intensive phase of encounter between Buddhism and the west during the Romantic era (afterward those relations shift from encounter to mutual interaction), sufficient refinement of western enlightenment epistemology had occurred to provide western philosophy with a glimpse of eastern views of enlightenment. For example, Shantideva in his famous treatise <i>The Way of the Bodhisattva</i> describes enlightenment (in terms rather close to Irigaray and Zajonc and easily conversant with Johnson's <i>Dictionary</i>) as the state where "beings like myself discern and grasp/That all things have the character of space," the spacetime where "the truth of voidness" resides within and issues forth from "the chasms and abysses of existence" (159).</p></li><li><p>The transference (or perhaps sublimation) of energies generated through the glimpse of these far shores was easily accomplished, since Romantic descriptions of enlightenment offered by, for example, Blake (in <i>The Four Zoas</i>) and Shelley (in <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>) converge with those found in Buddhist texts emerging in European languages for the first time across the nineteenth century. This coincidence of forms of enlightenment as self-annihilation ripples through all the works in this volume. The genesis of this collection, then, began with seemingly simple questions asked of myself (and occasionally others), and the works appearing in this volume represent answers offered by insightful and engaged colleagues: "What's going on with Buddhism during the Romantic period? Can and should academic and spiritual practices be unified and interrelated, thereby helping heal an artificially conditioned alienation common within the increasingly corporate academy?" My answer began through merging meditative and devotional practices with pedagogical and service commitments, where William Blake's "proverb of hell" served as the ethical foundation for them all: "The most sublime act is to place another before you" (36.17).</p></li><li><p>Around the same time I first asked the question, admitted the motive, and sought to move theory into practice, I met Timothy Morton at the 1995 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), and across the next two years and several conferences, whether in Baltimore or Bloomington, our conversations often swirled around coincident personal histories and shared academic affinities within the broad area of "Buddhism and Romanticism." When I was asked to review John Rudy's <i>Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying</i> (SUNY, 1996) for <i>Romantic Circles</i>, my sense of growing community and commitment created broadened possibilities, and in a preliminary attempt to put academic flesh on the intuitive bones, I proposed a special session at the 2001 NASSR conference in Seattle, where Tim Morton and John Rudy were joined by Louise Economides in the initial articulation of the issues and authors grappled with through this volume. When I began to receive the essays for this volume, I had two other significant encounters that pushed the work toward its present ripeness. At the moment when the following essays began to arrive, Norman Dubie kindly offered me an autographed copy of his most recent collection of poems (<i>Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum</i>, which includes the stunning "Shambhala" [48-53]), and I asked whether he might want to submit a poem for the volume, given his long-term practice of Tibetan Buddhism and its rippling presence in past poetry. After explaining his exhaustion from his poetic past labor, he said he would consider it but that I should not be overly hopeful. However, within forty-eight hours, he stunned me when he read the first iteration of the opening poem for this volume on my answering machine. As I moved into the editing for the volume, I re-encountered Dennis McCort's <i>Going Beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen Buddhism, and Deconstruction</i> and immediately wrote him to request an essay. Initially, he indicated that, with the exception of an essay on Kafka, he had no work prepared for such an undertaking, and with a sense of loss, I wrote to say that Kafka might fall too far outside the temporal range of the volume. But within forty-eight hours, having been haunted by the intersections such an essay promised, I wrote him again and asked for the essay, and I am thrilled he agreed to join this "visionary company." Rather than rehearse the elements easily discerned from the essays themselves, the remainder of this introduction will provide a context within which readers can explore the resonances at work in the essays themselves as they connect to broader historical and cultural developments mapped in subsequent sections of this introduction. At the outset, readers of this introduction should know that I have cast an intentionally broad textual net (of Indra perhaps), drawing upon works from the two primary vehicles of the dharma&#8212;the Hinayana and Mahayana&#8212;as well as the three major languages&#8212;Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan&#8212;by which the major sutras were disseminated across southeast, central, and northern Asia and through which the teachings of the Buddha returned to India and subsequently flowed into western consciousness.</p><p style="font-weight: bold">II. The Emergence of Buddhism into Romantic Europe</p></li><li><p>Although I have traced elsewhere the punctuated phases of encounter leading to the emergence of Buddhism into western consciousness during the Romantic Age, I will nonetheless provide a brief historical map to provide a better context within which to read the essays that follow (Lussier 1-27). The temporal range Raymond Williams adopted for European Romanticism, approximately from the birth of Blake to the death of Wordsworth (30-2), actually coincides rather well with the textual emergence of Buddhism into western consciousness. Across this period, the religion originating with the enlightenment of the historical being named Siddhartha Gautama evolved from initial western views of a philosophy operating "under the imputation of atheism" (Fields 47) practiced by "Idolaters" (Polo I.219) through the publication of travel narratives recording specific encounters, of summative histories of eastern religions that, for the first time, clearly distinguished Buddhism from Hinduism, and finally of the most important canonical works, beginning with the <i>Lotus Sutra</i>. These developments flowed from the related activities of colonialism and empiricism now extended to the world through the application of categorical imperatives energizing its own form of enlightenment in its second, Romantic stage (Brown 38-46). The outward movement of Europeans across the trans-Himalayan and southeast Asian regions generated an influx of manuscripts and books, creating a counterflow of textual materials collected and catalogued on site and subsequently transmitted to European centers of oriental learning, where they were translated, collated, and edited. This dimension of the orientalist project led directly to the flowering of the dharma in Europe during the nineteenth century.</p></li><li><p>Both within the application of practices now termed "Orientalism" during the period and within the academic analysis of those practices in the influential work of Edward Said and his progeny, Buddhism has remained somewhat hidden from scholarly view, and several historical confluences help account for this relative absence. First, as scholarship has long established, long before the moment of heightened contact with Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century, the religion of the Buddha "had ceased to exist on the subcontinent" (Batchelor 232), being virtually eradicated as a practice within India "by the fourteenth century" (Lopez 53) and quite difficult to discern through the sparse architectural remains in northern India and Nepal. This same problem was equally true for the widely diverse sculptural presences of the Buddha and other deities dispersed across the continent in Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, China, Japan, Nepal, Siam, Tibet, and elsewhere, since revered figures often "morphed" through cultural contact and appropriation (the best example would be the transformation of the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, Avalokite&#347;vara, into Kuan-yin in Chinese and Chenrezig in Tibetan forms). Second, following "the close of the first stage of encounter, one defined primarily by spiritual colonialism, Japan and China closed their borders to the disruptive Europeans and its Jesuit shock troops" (Lussier 6), and the arena of encounter shifted to the subcontinent and also involved different European nationals, with the England, France, and Russia replacing Italy, Portugal and Spain at the vanguard of contact. Third, as the preceding list of countries confirms, the two major Buddhist traditions&#8212;the vehicles of Therav&#257;da (P&#257;li for "the way of the elders") and Mah&#257;y&#257;na (Sanskrit for "the great vehicle")&#8212;were "split" across national colonial lines among England, France, and Russia, again rendering attempts at a summative view extremely difficult (Keown 300, 167). Fourth, the textual body of the dharma was equally scattered across vast geophysical spaces and spread across numerous languages, although those primary to the emergence in Romantic Europe of the major sutras and commentaries defining the canonical literature were P&#257;li, Sanskrit, and Tibetan. Ironically, then, the textual body of Buddhism was itself a type of counterflow as well, since the dharma returned to northern India through the agency and agents of British authority in Calcutta and often returned along the same paths (e.g. through Darjeeling to Calcutta) through which it was dispersed from its homeland. The process of emergence was quite slow, unfolding with deliberation shaped by complexities, yet by the end of the nineteenth century, Buddhism had not only achieved status as a world religion within the west's sociology of knowledge but had even begun to exert a strange attraction on its occidental other.</p></li><li><p>The contradictions inherit in England's relations with India and its northern neighbors can clearly be discerned in the complicated history of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, who expressed his admiration for the "great originality. . . [and] sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction" of Indian mythology and culture in his preface to Charles Wilkins's 1785 translation of <i>The Bhagavad-Gita</i> (Allen and Trivedi 171) yet who was later put on trial for the supposed exploitation and abuse of "his power over the Indian people in Bengal" (Allen and Trivedi 37). Ultimately, in spite of scathing attacks mounted by Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the House of Lords, Hastings was acquitted of all charges after a decade-long impeachment trial, but his influence directly impacted policies subsequently pursued by the East India Company. However, even before his impeachment trial, Hastings initiated contact with the high lamas in Tibet through the diplomatic mission undertaken by the Scotsman George Bogle to the Teshoo Lama (Panchen Lama in current parlance), and as Kate Teltscher suggests, the effort "was as much textual as commercial or diplomatic" and was motivated by Hastings's hope to "imprint on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence" such texts might engender (Teltscher 94, 95). However, the hope of establishing long-term relations between Calcutta and Lhasa ended somewhat abruptly when the Panchen Lama and Bogle died "at nearly the same time," which, in the words of Captain Samuel Turner, created "almost insuperable difficulties in the way of re-establishing our intercourse with Tibet, at least for some considerable time to come" (Turner xvi).</p></li><li><p>As most critics of Oriental scholarship acknowledge, the prime mover of the eventual resolution of Buddhism from Hinduism in the European mind was certainly the towering presence behind the Oriental Renaissance, Sir William Jones, although his immediate interests upon arrival in Calcutta in 1783 were the Indian legal system and Hindu mythology (Cannon 194-6; Franklin 84-120). Jones shared Hastings's "respectful and sympathetic response to Hindu culture," for example beginning the study of Sanskrit almost immediately after his arrival, and through these studies Jones generated considerable "cultural empathy" for Indian literature and culture (Franklin 118, 120). In his first year of residency, Jones founded the two most conspicuous vehicles, the Asiatick Society of Bengal and its influential journal, through which Buddhism emerged into European knowledge, a point easily on display in the first issue of the journal, which included materials on Buddhist practices in Ceylon and Tibet. As a result of Jones's efforts, "the nascent field of Oriental philology" began to discover "certain linguistic, historical, cultural, and social continuities between the Orient and Europe" (Makdisi 110), yet the influx of materials also created, as Nigel Leask has documented, "anxieties about the Other" (2) that emerge in a broad range of writing across the Romantic period itself.</p></li><li><p>In spite of his Sanskrit studies, Jones never clearly differentiated Buddhism from Hinduism, since he continued to see the "Sage of the Shakyas" as "the ninth incarnation of Vishnu" (Fields 47), and Buddhism remained somewhat submerged in the literature and mythology of India until the second decade of the nineteenth century, when two individuals with radically different agendas, Brian Houghton Hodgson and Alexander Csoma de K&#246;r&#337;s, codified the canonical literature embedded in Sanskrit and Tibetan and transmitted manuscripts and texts to centers of oriental scholarship in Calcutta, London, and Paris.&#160; Known respectively as the "fathers" of Himalayan and Tibetan Studies, Hodgson and de K&#246;r&#337;s provided the linguistic and textual materials necessary for the translation and interpretation of major Buddhist works.</p></li><li><p>The motives of Hodgson were clearly colonial; he obtained a "special license" to enter Haileybury, which "had been founded in 1806 as a college to educate future civilian employees of the East India Company," through the intervention of James Pattinson, then director of the Company itself (Waterhouse 1-2), and during his residency he was befriended and mentored by Thomas Robert Malthus and completed studies by earning "honours in Bengali, Persian, Hindi, Political Economy and Classics&#8212;though failing in Mathematics" (Waterhouse 3). Although initially selecting Calcutta for his residency, Hodgson was promoted to Assistant Resident for Nepal shortly after his arrival and transferred to Katmandu, where he remained for almost twenty years, where the study of Buddhism became "his first interest," and where he encountered "the scholar Amritanada" (Waterhouse 4, 5). Hodgson began to collect Sanskrit manuscripts during this period, leading to the publication of his most influential "Sketch of Buddhism" (a work that cast long yet problematic shadows across the nineteenth century), yet his motivation was not any religious interest in the religion of the Buddha (he often expressed ambivalence in his own published works); rather he sought "to gather materials that would make it possible for others, specifically the members of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, to conduct such an investigation" (Lopez 52). Across his lengthy and distinguished, although somewhat controversial, career, Hodgson accumulated 423 works, and as Donald S. Lopez, Jr. indicates, this textual cache contained "the most important s&#363;tras and tantras of Sanskrit Buddhism, works that in India, and in translations into Chinese and Tibetan, were among the most important in the history of Buddhism" (55). In Stephen Batchelor's assessment, "Hodgson's contribution to Buddhist studies was not his scholarship; his importance lies in having provided the scholarly community with hitherto unknown Buddhist texts" (238). These works were transmitted to a variety of entities and individuals, including the Library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Royal Asiatic Society, but most importantly, Hodgson sent 59 works to Eugene Burnouf, who succeeded his teacher (L&#233;onard de Ch&#233;zy) to the first academic chair of Sanskrit in Europe at the Coll&#232;ge de France in Paris (Batchelor 239).</p></li><li><p>While Hodgson's motives were clearly colonial, the efforts of Alexander Csoma de K&#246;r&#337;s were decidedly "Romantic," since his was a search for linguistic and cultural origins, rather than colonial gain: "I cheerfully engaged in the study of it [Tibetan], hoping it might serve me as a vehicle to my immediate purpose, namely, my researches in respect to the origins and language of the Hungarians" (Csoma, "Preface" vl). Born in the small Transylvanian village of K&#246;r&#337;s and trained in philology and enlightenment epistemology by Eichhorn and Blumenbach at the University of Gottingen (where he joined two friends in an oath to seek the origins of the Hungarian peoples), Csoma undertook his "epic journey" in February 1819, one of the most arduous ever pursued outside of "official" sponsorship (Lussier 16-9). As his biographer Hirendra Nath Mukerjee relates, he left his small village "before the snows [melted and] only lightly clad as if he intended merely taking a walk," with only "a stick in his hand and a small bundle" of food and paper under his arm (15, 16). After almost two years of travel, primarily on foot, Csoma arrived at the Kashmir border with his meager financial resources exhausted and was offered letters of introduction and supplemental funds by William Moorcroft, a murky, mysterious "agent of the East India Company intent on securing influence in central Asia as a means of thwarting the southward advance of imperial Russia" (Batchelor 235) in the opening phase of what later became known, in Rudyard Kipling's apt phrase, as "The Great Game" (Hopkirk 20-3).</p></li><li><p>Csoma arrived at the Zangla Monastery in June 1823, where he entered Tibetan Studies with the head lama, Sangye Puntsog, who identified Skander Beg (the name Csoma used upon entering the subcontinent) as "a European. The first one, the very first one[,] to reach that place" (Terj&#233;k vii). More importantly for the emergence of Buddhism, the source used to teach Csoma Tibetan was nothing less than "the great compilation of the Tibetan Sacred Books, in one hundred volumes . . . styled Ka-gyur" (Csoma <i>Tibetan Studies</i> 175), placing him in contact with the entire Buddhist canon preserved in Tibetan. After seventeen months of intensive study, Csoma headed for Calcutta to seek the publication of an astonishing group of completed works, including the first <i>Tibetan-English Dictionary</i>, a <i>Tibetan Grammar in English</i>, and the massive <i>Mahavyutpatti</i> (which offered nothing less than a discursive map of the entire "psychological, logical, and metaphysical terminology of the Buddhists" [Csoma <i>Tibetan Studies</i> 20.397]). This last compilation included discussions of the most important works in the history of Buddhism, including "The Four Noble Truths" (Buddha), "The Middle Way" (Nagarjuna), "The Way of the Bodhisattva" (Shantideva), and the "Lamp for the Path of Enlightenment" (Atisha), and although the publication of this work was long delayed, Csoma drew upon his summation in numerous articles published in the major periodicals of oriental studies. Across the next nine years, Csoma often returned to Tibet to continue his studies and finally died on March 24, 1842 in Darjeeling while seeking to enter Lhasa for the first time. Unlike Hodgson's involvement in colonial machinations, Csoma remained aloof from such activities (for example, he never sealed a single letter in his long residency in the Indian subcontinent), earning the respect of those indigenous to the region, and "On 22 February 1933, Csoma was officially canonized as a bodhisattva in the grant hall of Taisho Buddhist University in Tokyo" (Batchelor 237). As Murkejee notes, this was "the highest praise a man can get in Buddhist terms" (74), since the term <i>bodhisattva</i> (Sanskrit for "enlightenment being") designates one who strives for enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, rather than one working toward individual release from the wheel of reincarnation (and this difference defines the chief doctrinal departure between, respectively, the Mahayana and Hinayana vehicles in Buddhist practice).</p></li><li><p>Once the work of Csoma was joined to the work of Hodgson, the majority of elements necessary for the full flowering of the dharma in European thought were in place, since Eugene Burnouf, the recipient of some of Hodgson's manuscripts and aware of Csoma's research publications, was simply the "man best equipped to make sense of them" (Batchelor 239). Burnouf had completed a major study of the other linguistic thread within which the Buddhist canon was preserved (P&#257;li) and published a dictionary of the language in the 1824. Once his work was supplemented by that of George Turnour, who published a summation of "the Buddhist literature of Ceylon, and who composed in the sacred language of that island, the ancient Pali" (Lopez 54) in 1834, the linguistic pieces were in place. As a preliminary move to publishing major translations of the s&#363;tras, Burnouf published a definitive history of Buddhism in India in 1844 (a work exerting massive influence across the second half of the nineteenth century), and although Burnouf died before it could appear, his translation of the <i>Lotus S&#363;tra</i>, published in 1852, became "the first full-length translation of a Buddhist s&#363;tra from Sakskrit into a European language" (Batchelor 241).</p></li><li><p>Burnouf's <i>Introduction &#224; l'historie du Buddhisme Indien</i> offered "the prototype of the European concept of Buddhism" (Batchelor 239) and quickly became "the most influential scholarly work on Buddhism in the nineteenth century" (Lopez quoting Max M&#252;ller), first influencing Arthur Schopenhauer and through post-1844 editions of his masterwork <i>The World as Will and Representation</i> subsequently influencing Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner among others. As Schopenhauer admits, his knowledge of Buddhism was incomplete, and his emphasis on "will" and "representation" underwrote his "misreading or misprision" (Bloom 3), thereby skewing his understanding of Buddhist concepts like "empty nothingness" and "nirvana." Yet, through his specific misunderstanding of these concepts, he found them provocative and important, since both concepts were compatible with a mindset where "subject and object no longer exist" (Schopenhauer I.412).</p></li><li><p>Of course, this eradication of dualism lurks at the core of most European Romanticism's refinement of enlightenment epistemology. For this reason, the shift in ethical thought one finds in Nietzsche, where the major problem for philosophy and society alike was not the battle against "sin" (a resistant element from the eclipsed theological episteme that preceded the emergence of enlightenment epistemology) but against "suffering," finds its roots in Schopenhauer's reception of Buddhism:</p><blockquote>Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity&#8212;it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives <i>after</i> a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept "God" is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only really <i>positivistic</i> religion history has to show us . . . it no longer speaks of "the struggle against sin," but quite in accordance with actuality, "the struggle against <i>suffering</i>." It has already . . . the self-deception of moral concepts behind it&#8212;it stands, in my language, <i>beyond</i> good and evil. (Nietzsche 129)</blockquote><p>The language Nietzsche draws upon&#8212;"cool and objective" and "positivistic"&#8212;shows its enlightenment epistemic roots, yet the hammering philosopher's view that all suffering results from "the self-deception of moral concepts" intersects both Buddhist and Romantic theories of self and society.</p><p style="font-weight: bold">III. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and Romanticism</p></li><li><p>The issue of suffering and its causes, the focus of Nietzsche's salutary comments about Buddhist thought, functions as "the very foundation" (Gyatso 1) of both Hinayana and Mahayana forms of Buddhist practice yet equally operates in foundational ways within a broad range of Romantic thought as well. As Ken Jones suggests, the tradition of "inconceivable liberation" embedded in most Buddhist traditions (a term borrowed from the <i>Vimalakirti Sutra</i>) and "modernity's humanistic project of social emancipation are complementary" (xvi), and numerous Romantic thinkers across both its periodic term and national traditions were motivated to develop an engaged form of philosophic <i>praxis</i> that strove to transform both physical and metaphysical reality. Perhaps confirmed through my admittedly all-too-brief historical survey of Buddhism's direct emergence into European awareness during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anyone seeking direct "influence" between Buddhist thought and practices and those developed within the full range of Romantic thought will quite likely only experience historical disappointment, since the canon of the sutras was simply not available until the second half of the nineteenth century. (Indeed, I have considered this aspect of the topic in two other works, one appearing in the electronic journal <i>Literature Compass</i> and the other included in the collection <i>Interrogating Orientalism[s]</i>.) After all, even Sir William Jones (who was primarily responsible for launching what Raymond Schwab termed the "Oriental Renaissance") had still not clearly differentiated Buddhism from Hinduism by his death, and such discernment awaited the work published in Jones's influential journal (e.g. by Csoma, Hodgson, and H. H. Wilson among others) and the translation of texts arriving into centers of European orientalism via a strong colonial counterflow of materials. And so, this last section will only gesture at the deeper resonances between the broad terms of "Buddhism" and "Romanticism" by focusing on the nature of suffering and the degree to which the pursuit of enlightenment, either in its eastern or western forms, delivers freedom from that suffering.</p></li><li><p>Buddha's elaboration of the role of suffering was offered seven weeks after his enlightenment, although it took the pleas of "the two highest gods in the realm of samsara [illusion], Indra and Brahma" (K. Rinpoche 13) to overcome the Buddha's initial reticence regarding his ability to teach those "who live in lust and hate" (Bodhi 48, 70). The Buddha's "first formal teaching [took place] at a place known as the Deer Park, in Sarnath near Varanasi, India" (K. Rinpoche 13), and this opening sutra stands at the foundation of all Buddhist vehicles and canons:</p><blockquote>Just as one who stands on a mountain peak<br/>
Can see below the people all around,<br/>
So, O wise one, all-seeing sage,<br/>
Ascend the palace of the Dhamma.<br/>
Let the sorrowless one survey this human breed,<br/>
Engulfed in sorrow, overcome by birth and old age.<br/>
(Bodhi 71)</blockquote><p>Prompted by Brahm&#257; Sahampati, the enlightened Buddha turned the first wheel of the dharma in order to expound the four noble truths to only "five of his former ascetic companions" (Keown 71), and these truths are based on the recognition that all sentient beings aspire to achieve happiness by overcoming suffering:</p><blockquote>1. The truth of suffering ("birth," "decay," and "death")<br/>
2. The truth of the origins of suffering ("craving")<br/>
3. The truth of cessation of suffering ("fading away," "extinction of craving")<br/>
4. The truth of the path beyond suffering ("The Noble Eightfold Path": "right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration")<br/>
(Kornfield 28-31)</blockquote><p>Commentaries on these concepts literally fill monastic libraries (east and west), but a condensed discussion should provide transition to analogous insights resonating with Romantic literature.</p></li><li><p>Buddhist literature proposes a tripartite structure to the suffering associated with <i>sams&#257;ra</i> (Sanskrit: P&#257;li, "flowing on"), "the cycle of repeated birth and death that individuals undergo" (Keown 248). At a fundamental level, all sentient beings share the painful experiences of birth, sickness, old age, and death, and it was precisely Siddhartha Gautama's early encounter with these four universal "ties of life" (Carus 13) that propelled him from his luxurious existence and onto the path of the dharma (Carus 13-25). At a secondary level, the suffering of change emerges through recognition that the temporary relief provided by short-term pleasures eventually undergoes change as well, giving rise to subsequent suffering through the form of grasping at such pleasures. Finally, the third level of suffering of conditioning "refers to the bare fact of our unenlightened existence . . . under the influence" of ignorance of these noble truths (Gyatso 54). This last, broadest view of suffering is directly connected to the tendency of individuals to grasp as fixed and immutable "the impermanent nature of reality" (Gyatso 54-5), an existential misprision that relentlessly generates on-going suffering through the ego's willed ignorance of and resistance to dependent origination (interdependent versus independent existence). Once the first three "truths" are recognized and embraced, then meditative practice would work to re/cognize mind's relationships with itself and all others, therein leading consciousness into nirvana, the state of freedom beyond all suffering inscribed within cyclic existence.</p></li><li><p>Once suffering as boundary condition is perceived and once the role ignorance plays in maintaining suffering is unveiled, the crucial question shifts to the possibility of cessation and the "nirvana" experienced in that cessation. Can one achieve liberation from suffering and what method best assures such cessation? Within Buddhist practice, cessation emerges with the recognition of the impermanent nature of all things, all thoughts, all selves, hence the tendency to focus on <i>&#347;&#363;nyat&#257;</i> (Sanskrit: P&#257;li, s&#363;&#241;&#241;att&#257;), "emptiness or nothingness" (Keown 282) in some forms of analytic meditative practice. The robust literature surrounding the <i>Praj&#241;&#257;-p&#257;ramit&#257; S&#363;tras</i> (<i>The Diamond Sutra</i> and <i>The Heart Sutra</i>) pursues precisely this "perfection of insight/wisdom" (Keown 218) and "consists of thirty-eight different books, composed in India between 100 B.C. and A.D. 600" (Conze xxviii). Both works are associated with teachings undertaken by Shakyamuni Buddha on Vulture Peak in the sixth century B.C.E., and both aim at nothing "less than the total extinction of the self" (Conze xxix).</p></li><li><p>As well as being one of the first works directly translated into a European language from Sanskrit, <i>The Diamond Sutra</i>, which literally translates as "diamond-cutter," also "has the distinction of being the oldest printed book [and] was completed by Wang Chieh on May 11, 868 [CE]" (Conze 75). This work traces the shift of emphasis from individual cessation to the bodhisattva dedication to relieve universal suffering at all levels of existence (from a Hinayana to a Mahayana interpretation), a view apparent in the following response Buddha offers to a query by Subhuti: "As many beings as there are in the universe of beings, comprehended under the term "beings"&#8212;egg-born, born from a womb, moisture-born, or miraculously born; with or without form; with perception, without perception, and with neither perception nor nonperception&#8212;as far as any conceivable form of beings is conceived: all these I must lead to Nirvana, into that Realm of Nirvana which leaves nothing behind" (Conze 16). This refinement of the four noble truths establishes an "ethos of otherness" wherein "the most sublime act is to place another before you" and also provides insight into the divergent paths taken by Hinayana and Mahayana forms of practice.</p></li><li><p>While <i>The Diamond Sutra</i> offers an elaborate and extended refinement on the first turning of the wheel of dharma, <i>The Heart Sutra</i> presents the negative dialectics associated with the Buddhist view of "emptiness" in a condensed (and hence dense) formulation, rendering the conception (<i>&#347;&#363;nyat&#257;</i>) perhaps the most difficult concept for the initial reception of Buddhist thought in Romantic Europe, due to its seemingly paradoxical path to knowledge. Early in the work, the bodhisattva Avolokitesvara volunteers to explain "the bodhisattva's Heart of Perfect Wisdom which is the Universal Womb of Wisdom" (Kornfield 135) and offers the following phrase: "form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness" (Conze 86). This complex view of the emptiness of forms and forms of emptiness leads to articulate the mantra that stands at the "heart" or "core" of the wisdom leading to enlightenment precisely because it points "beyond": "Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi, Svaha!" ("Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all hail!" [Conze 113]). As Paul Williams suggests, the terms of this mantra point to "the Abhidharma [Sanskrit, "higher doctrine"]" wherein is critiqued "the claim to have found some things which really, ultimately exist," and for those who strive "to practice these teachings in meditation and life the requirement of completing letting go [going beyond altogether] . . . is an extremely difficult one [and] very frightening" (48).</p></li><li><p>Not surprisingly, the German revolution in Romantic philosophy at the beginning of the Romantic period, inaugurated with Goethe and Kant and extending through the Schlegels and Novalis to Hegel, elaborated a similar view of required complementarity capable of moving beyond polar opposition. The realization of freedom within the Kantian configuration of consciousness as the experience of "unity in the <i>existence</i> of appearances" (Kant 393) arguably provides within late eighteenth century European philosophy the strongest analogue to diverse Buddhist descriptions of enlightenment and certainly requires the necessity of thinking of the self "both a 'phenomenon' and as 'noumenon'" where perceived complementarity requires "a kind of <i>negative</i> consciousness" (36-7). Romantic literature is replete with aesthetic examples of this philosophical tenet, whether in Coleridge's recognition of "the one life within us and abroad" ("The Eolian Harp" [28.26]) or Shelley's insistence that subjectivity itself is defined by the "unremitting interchange" ("Mont Blanc" [98.39]) between mind and matter. In its rethinking of European enlightenment epistemology, Romantic thought began to grapple with both metaphysical complementarities and cultural relativities, where the "vital nothingness" discovered at the foundation of both consciousness and cosmos necessarily requires a process of self-emptying to confront the reality of subject as "egoless participant" (Rudy [2004] 20). As Dennis McCort has rigorously argued (see as well <a href="/praxis/buddhism/mccort/mccort.html" shape="rect">his essay included here</a>), the German Romantic tradition offered "the brilliant if brief climax of the long spiritual development of a world view that was heterodox, though in no way opposed, to the predominantly rationalist outlook of the preceding and following eras" and strove to make, in August Schlegel's phrase, a "commitment to everything" (21, 23) that would lead to "self-realization" through negative dialectics and self-annihilation. Of course, dialectical thought in all its varied vehicles can only lead to G. W. F. Hegel, and as <a href="/praxis/buddhism/morton/morton.html" shape="rect">Timothy Morton</a>'s thoughtful and energetic analysis of Hegel's somewhat conflicted reception of Buddhism attests (see below), the very element of emptiness resisted so strongly by Hegel subsequently becomes the very ground of analytic critique for the philosophical inheritors of European Romantic philosophies and practices, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Bohr, Derrida, Foucault, Heisenberg, and beyond (Plotnitsky 7-13, 249-60).</p></li><li><p>Hegel provides an appropriate transition back to Romanticism's version of enlightenment, which is described briefly above and by which the age modifies prior forms of epistemological enlightenment prevalent during the eighteenth century. Certainly, as this brief discussion indicates, great accord can be found between emergent forms of Romantic thought and practice and the four noble truths and the perfection of wisdom derived from <i>The Diamond Sutra</i> and <i>The Heart Sutra</i>. As the essays in this volume attest, the elements within the German expression of Romanticism provide strong resonance with emergent Buddhism, where writers like Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group "are seen as 'enlightening the Enlightenment about itself and saving it thus'" (Chaouli 44). This saving of the Enlightenment involved the eradication of crippling dualism within western thought, a philosophical move conversant with the similar strategy, deployed against binary structuration, pursued much later by deconstruction in general and Derrida in particular (McCort 167-8). Such refashioning of enlightenment epistemology lead Friedrich Schlegel to insist, in 1800, that "in the Orient we must seek the highest Romanticism," and, in 1803, to coin the phrase "Oriental Renaissance" to characterize the reception accorded the explosion of materials arriving in Europe from Asia (quoted in Batchelor 252).</p></li><li><p>One can see the German version of this "highest Romanticism" in the writing of numerous authors. For example, in August Wilhelm Schlegel's 1808 Vienna lectures, he argues for a "commitment to everything" later summed up in Novalis's arresting image of "being": "All being, being <i>per</i> se, is nothing but a being-free&#8212;a hovering between extremes" (McCort 23, 24). As Dennis McCort forcefully argues, Novalis "holds the self, conceived as an autonomous entity, to be relatively unreal," with the self functioning as "dialectical oscillation rather than discrete entity" (McCort 167), where the poet's view of self exists in relational rather than essential terms: "The seat of the soul is to be found there where inner world and outer world touch. Where they interpenetrate, it is in each point of the interpenetration" (quot. by McCort 31). German Romantic thought sought to overcome the "human drive for fixity . . . that must, finally be relinquished if man is to realize what Nietzsche, in a moment of neo-Romantic illumination, called 'the transvaluation of values,' that is, the equal and absolute value of everything" (McCort 23).</p></li><li><p>In both <a href="/praxis/buddhism/dubie/dubie.html" shape="rect">Norman Dubie's poem</a> and <a href="/praxis/buddhism/economides/economides.html" shape="rect">Louise Economides's essay</a>, Blake is seen as a crucial mediating figure for the volume's concerns, and Blake has often, through his robust and extended critique of enlightenment epistemology, offered direct connections to Buddhist thought, as Allen Ginsberg makes clear in poems and essays (Ginsberg 282-4). To make his connections apparent, Ginsberg points directly to Blake's analysis of "the changes of Urizen" in <i>The Book of Urizen</i>, where each age offers "torment," "harrowing fear," "craving," "terror" and leads to states of "dismal woe" (74-76). Blake's <i>Urizen</i> offers a severe critique of "the 'rational' pursuit of a self" (McCort 31) through Urizen's illusory vision of "solitary" existence (a sovereign self) and his desire for a reality "without fluctuations" (Blake 71). Blake's antidote to this severe diagnosis occurs rather late in the canon and involves "self-annihilation," with the poet proposing in <i>Milton</i> that "the Laws of Eternity [require] that each shall mutually/Annihilate himself for others good" (139.36). Blake's view here clearly intersects the position articulated by the Buddha, where "the annihilation of self is the condition of enlightenment" (Carus 4) yet equally connects with his articulation of an ethos of otherness expressed as early as <i>The Book of Thel</i>: "everything that lives,/Lives not alone, nor for itself" (5.26-7).</p></li><li><p>As John Rudy has previously argued, initially through Wordsworth and more recently through other English Romantics (e.g. Blake, Coleridge and Keats), the cultivation of meditative quiescence in the indwelling of Romantic poetry led directly to the implosion of "all potential dualism between self and other" and yielded as its by-product an experience of "the soul's greatness" through "its ability to eliminate itself" (<i>Romanticism</i> 40, 78-9), and <a href="/praxis/buddhism/rudy/rudy.html" shape="rect">here he traces</a> a similar process through Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." In similar ways, the poet John Keats offers an analogous form of the "no self" state (Sanskrit: "an&#257;tman") within Buddhist thought. For Keats, as argued in the oft quoted letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818)&#8212;wherein he stands against the "Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime"&#8212;the poet argues that "poetical Character itself . . . has no self," since "it is everything and nothing," and he then argues further that the poet "is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no identity . . . he has no self" (501). Thus, both Keats and Novalis as Romantic authors "inaugurated a certain sense of authorship and, at the same time, in the very same breath, announced the author's imminent demise" (Bennett 55), a view clearly intersecting several strands of argument pursued in all the essays in the volume.</p></li><li><p>Certainly, when exploring the varied types of suffering evoked by Romantic writers, the movement from "sin" to "suffering" is manifest repeatedly. The period's most overt evocation of an eternal state of suffering, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's <i>The Rime of the Ancient Mariner</i>, precisely positions the origin of that suffering in a willed act of an "independent" self who has forgotten the "reality" of dependent origination. In one of the text's endlessly fascinating nuances, the residual of this knowledge lurks in the crew's "superstitious" belief that albatross and weather are connected (I forgo further commentary here, since I have treated it in more extensively elsewhere). The Byronic mode of Romanticism, as represented by works like <i>Childe Harold</i>, <i>The Giaour</i>, or <i>Manfred</i>, maintains relentless focus on suffering and its subsequent re-inscription through relentless and remorseless self-consciousness (the "self-anatomizing gaze" shared by the Cenci family in Shelley's drama) when the temporary satisfaction of transient pleasures collapses. The "fullness of Satiety" that occurs through running "Sin's long labyrinth" simply leaves Harold "sore sick at heart" (26). The moment that the Giaour realizes that his actions have caused the death of his beloved Leila, he becomes enclosed in "a life of pain" (90), leading to "the grief of years," as he compulsively replays the event (even on his death bed), while for Manfred, his existential state is defined by "Grief" and "Sorrow" that accompanies his inability to achieve "forgetfulness" and "self-oblivion" (125, 128, 129). What Byron's major characters seek yet achieve not is a form of self-forgetting affiliated with "self-annihilation" termed by Geoffrey Hartman "anti-self-consciousness," since "it is consciousness, ultimately, which alienates them [Romantic artists] from life and imposes the burden of a self which religion or death or a return to the state of nature might dissolve" (51). Like Blake, Percy Shelley finds a middle path beyond these ultimately restrictive possibilities, the "perfect symmetry" of seamless interconnectivity between Promethean mind and alterity itself.</p></li><li><p>The type of self-overcoming suggested by Hartman is most prominently displayed in Percy Shelley's <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>, a work that intersects the concerns offered in Blake's <i>The Four Zoas</i> but which pursues its aims in a Hellenic rather than Hebraic mythic framework. Yet the work of Shelley that most presages suffering as vehicle of self-realization is "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills," which offers an extended poetic analysis of "the deep wide sea of Misery" we share but which culminates with the realization that shared "love . . . heals all strife" (118.365). For both Byron and Shelley, the Promethean mode provides a vehicle for exploring "suffering," "pain," and "agony" (Byron 15.6; 16.9-10) founded in an ethos of otherness, where the attempt to assuage "the sum of human wretchedness" leads to relentless "torture" (Byron 16.18, 37). In Shelley's more compelling and extended treatment, the bound Titan offers, following the recollection of his curse against Jupiter (where he wishes for infinite suffering for the usurping god), a stunning renunciation that enacts a form of self-annihilation grounded in his own version of an ethos of otherness: "words are quick and vain;/Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine./I wish no living thing to suffer pain" (Shelley 218.303-5). Here Shelley opposes hate with love, a position seen in Blake's earlier argument from <i>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</i> and elsewhere that "everything that lives is Holy" (45).</p></li><li><p>In both Romantic and Buddhist forms, self-annihilation functions as antidote to the cultural reification of an illusory spectre of identity, an essential and sovereign self, that continually creates all the suffering experienced in the world. Of course, this is precisely the truth of suffering resident in the inaugural teaching of the fourth noble truths at the foundation of all Buddhist systems. What the "highest Romanticism" discovers beyond the self is, simply put, everything and nothing. With some shared affinities established, although by no means exhausted, I invite readers to plunge into the works that follow, since each work in the volume argues in different yet interrelated ways for a shared view in Buddhism and Romanticism of forms of suffering created by the self and of the freedom from suffering found in self-annihilation. Emptiness resides in plenitude and solitude, the problematic path for Buddhists and Romanticists alike.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><br/>
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Allen, Richard and Harish Trivedi, eds. <i>Literature and Nation: Britain and India, 1800-1990</i>. London: Routledge/The Open University, 2000.</p><p class="hang">Batchelor, Stephen. <i>The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture</i>. Berkeley: Parallax, 1994.</p><p class="hang">Bennett, Andrew. <i>The Author</i>. London: Routledge, 2005.</p><p class="hang">Blake, William. <i>The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</i>. Ed. David V. Erdman. Garden City: Anchor Press-Doubleday, 1982.</p><p class="hang">Bloom, Harold. <i>A Map of Misreading</i>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975.</p><p class="hang">Bodhi, Bhikkhu, ed. <i>In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the P&#257;li Canon</i>. Boston: Wisdom, 2005.</p><p class="hang">Brown, Marshall. "Romanticism and Enlightenment." <i>The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism</i>. Ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.</p><p class="hang">Byron, George Gordon Lord. <i>Byron's Poetry</i>. Ed. Frank McConnell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.</p><p class="hang">Cannon, Garland. <i>The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.</p><p class="hang">Carus, Paul. <i>The Gospel of Buddha</i>. La Salle: Open Court, 1990.</p><p class="hang">Chaouli, Michel. <i>The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Works of Friedrich Schlegel</i>. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.</p><p class="hang">Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Eolian Harp." <i>Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors</i>. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.</p><p class="hang">Conze, Edward, tr. <i>Buddhist Wisdom, containing The Diamond Sutra and The Heart Sutra</i>. New York: Vintage-Random House, 2001.</p><p class="hang">Csoma de K&#246;r&#337;s, Alexander. <i>Tibetan-English Dictionary</i>. Budapest: Akad&#233;miai Kiad&#243;, 1984.</p><p class="hang">---. <i>Tibetan Studies: Being a Reprint of the Articles Contributed to</i> The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal <i>and</i> Asiatic Researches. Budapest: Akad&#233;miai Kiad&#243;, 1984.</p><p class="hang">Dubie, Norman. <i>Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum</i>. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon P, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Fields, Rick. <i>How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America</i>. 3<sup>rd</sup> Ed. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.</p><p class="hang">Franklin, Michael J. <i>Sir William Jones</i>. Cardiff: U of Wakes P, 1995.</p><p class="hang">Ginsberg, Allen. <i>Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995</i>. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.</p><p class="hang">Gyatso, Tenzin (The XIV Dalai Lama). <i>The Four Noble Truths</i>. Hammersmith: Thorsons-HarperCollins, 1997.</p><p class="hang">Hartman, Geoffrey H. "Romanticism and &#8216;Anti-Self-Consciousness.'" <i>Romanticism and Consciousness</i>. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.</p><p class="hang">Hopkirk, Peter. <i>The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia</i>. Kodansha International, 1994.</p><p class="hang">Irigaray, Luce. <i>Between East and West: From Singularity to Community</i>. Trans. Stephen Pluh&#225;&#269;ek. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.</p><p class="hang">Johnson, Samuel. <i>A Dictionary of the English Language</i>. New York: Barnes &amp; Noble Books, 1994.</p><p class="hang">Jones, Ken. <i>The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action</i>. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003.</p><p class="hang">Kant, Immanuel. <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i>. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan &amp; Co, 1970.</p><p class="hang">Keats, John. <i>Complete Poetry and Selected Letters of John Keats</i>. New York: The Modern Library, 2002.</p><p class="hang">Keown, Damien. <i>Dictionary of Buddhism</i>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.</p><p class="hang">Kornfield, Jack, Ed. <i>Teachings of the Buddha</i>. Boston: Shambhala, 1996.</p><p class="hang">Leask, Nigel. <i>British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.</p><p class="hang">Lopez, Donald S Jr. "The Ambivalent Exegete: Hodgson's Contributions to the study of Buddhism." <i>The Origin of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling, 1820-1858</i>. Ed. David M. Waterhouse. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Lussier, Mark. "Buddhism and Romanticism." <i>LiteratureCompass</i> 3.5 (Fall 2006). 1107-1137.</p><p class="hang">---. "Colonial Counterflow: From Orientalism to Buddhism." Eds. Diane Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass. <i>(Re)Interrogating Orientalisms</i>. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.</p><p class="hang">Makdisi, Saree. <i>Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.</p><p class="hang">McCort, Dennis. <i>Going Beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen, and Deconstruction</i>. Albany; SUNY P, 2001.</p><p class="hang">Nietzsche, Friedrich. <i>Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ</i>. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Ltd., 1968.</p><p class="hang">Olson, Phillip. <i>The Discipline of Freedom: A Kantian View of the Role of Moral Precepts in Zen Practice</i>. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.</p><p class="hang">Plotnitsky, Arkady. <i>Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology After Bohr and Derrida.</i> Durham: Duke UP, 1994.</p><p class="hang">Polo, Marco. <i>The Travels of Marco Polo</i>. Vol. 1. New York: Dover, 1933.</p><p class="hang">Rudy, John. <i>Romanticism and Zen Buddhism</i>. <i>Studies in Comparative Literature</i>, Vol 56. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen P, 2004.</p><p class="hang">---. <i>Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying</i>. Albany: SUNY P, 1996.</p><p class="hang">Schwab, Raymond. <i>The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880</i>. Trans. Gene Paterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.</p><p class="hang">Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Mont Blanc." <i>Shelley's Poetry and Prose</i>. Eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.</p><p class="hang">Teltscher, Kate. "The Lama and the Scotsman: George Bogle in Bhutan and Tibet, 1774-75." <i>The Global Eighteenth Century</i>. Ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum. Baltimore: Thye Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.</p><p class="hang">Terj&#233;k, J&#243;zsef. "Alexander Csoma de K&#246;r&#337;s: A Short Biography." <i>Tibetan-English Dictionary</i>. Budapest: Akad&#233;miai Kiad&#243;, 1984.</p><p class="hang">Turner, Captain Samuel. <i>An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet containing a Narrative of a Journey through Bootan and Part of Tibet</i>. London: W. Bulmer, 1800.</p><p class="hang">Schopenhauer, Arthur. <i>The World as Will and Representation</i>. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969.</p><p class="hang">Sh&#257;ntideva. <i>The Way of the Bodhisattva</i>. Trans. The Padmakara Translation Group. Boston: Shambhala, 1997. London: Routledge, 1989.</p><p class="hang">Williams, Paul. <i>Mahay&#257;n&#257; Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations.</i></p><p class="hang">Williams, Raymond. <i>Culture and Society, 1780-1950</i>. New York: Columbia UP, 1958.</p><p class="hang">Wordsworth, William. <i>William Wordsworth: The Oxford Authors</i>. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.</p><p class="hang">Zajonc, Arthur. <i>Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind</i>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.<br/><br/></p></div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/lussier-mark">Lussier, Mark</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/george-bogle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Bogle</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/eugene-burnouf" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eugene Burnouf</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/673" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bodhisattva</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1286" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">colonialism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/675" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">East India Company</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/brian-houghton-hodgson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Brian Houghton Hodgson</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/677" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/sir-william-jones" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sir William Jones</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/alexander-csoma-de-koros" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alexander Csoma de Koros</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/680" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nepal</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-nietzsche" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Nietzsche</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/682" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orientalism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/sangye-puntsog" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sangye Puntsog</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/684" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Romanticism and Buddhism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/arthur-schopenhauer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Schopenhauer</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/686" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tibet</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/norman-dubie" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Norman Dubie</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/arthur-zajonc" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Zajonc</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-blake" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Blake</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/dennis-mccort" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dennis McCort</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/warren-hastings" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Warren Hastings</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/luce-irigaray-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Luce Irigaray</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/allen-ginsberg" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Allen Ginsberg</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/sir-william-jones" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sir William Jones</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/shantideva" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Shantideva</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/eugene-burnouf" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eugene Burnouf</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/donald-s-lopez-jr" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Donald S. Lopez , Jr.</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-g-rudy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John G. Rudy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/timothy-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Timothy Morton</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/brian-houghton-hodgson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Brian Houghton Hodgson</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/stephen-batchelor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Stephen Batchelor</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/louise-economides" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Louise Economides</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/lhasa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lhasa</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/seattle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Seattle</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/darjeeling" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Darjeeling</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/baltimore" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Baltimore</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/bloomington" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bloomington</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/calcutta" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Calcutta</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/nepal" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nepal</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/italy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Italy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/cambodia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cambodia</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/france" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">France</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/japan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Japan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/russia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Russia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/portugal" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Portugal</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/burma" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Burma</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/china" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">China</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/tibet" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tibet</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/spain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spain</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/india" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/bhutan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bhutan</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/kashmir" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kashmir</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/arizona" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arizona</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/asia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Asia</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/himalayan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Himalayan</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:28:57 +0000rc-admin16352 at http://www.rc.umd.edu